Caveat: I'm pretty new to Hubitat HE, about two weeks I think. But I'm about the oldest old-dawg in the junkyard; I started on BSR X10, was a regular author in a national home automation magazine, and wrote a highly popular add-in for HomeSeer years ago and for SmartThings around four years ago, which others wound up supporting in a variety of platforms.
And now I'm here.
After my fairly-aggressive migration (I was so over SmartThings developer-antagonism, outages and the mobile app making me switch browsers), my first "project" was LED Strip Lights between the valence and windows of our picture windows. Seems simple enough... LED strips, a controller, a transformer, done.
Umm... not so much.
Challenge #1: Hubitat HE ain't quite where the class leaders are on device discovery. I started with a Giderwel / Gledopto RGBCCT 2-ID Controller and strip ... and quickly learned that HE couldn't find both SSIDs. (Other hubs apparently can.) And, per @mike.maxwell, the device support queue is long enough that this won't be supported anytime soon.
Okay, fine, switch it out. The Gledopto kit had all-in-one, but moving on, word is that RGBGenie is the best supported non-Hue option. Sylvania/Osram also, but less revered and far more expensive. So...
I bought an RGBGenie 1005 Zigbee, a few RGB+W strips and a transformer.
Challenge #2: Guess what? Word on the street is optimistic. The Zigbee RGBGenie controller cannot control white, while the Z-Wave can. (Mike's opinion on colorspace is not, apparently, reflected by Giderwel or by RGBGenie.) Oh well... would've been nice to know up-front, but sometimes you are the pioneer with the wounds in the back.
Oh well, no worries, I wanted it for illumination anyhow. Onward!
These strips (two of them) are being mounted to the ceiling. A very hard-to-reach ceiling, high and not ladder-friendly. Because I'm no neophyte, we clean the ceiling first with alcohol. Seriously, if you want tape to stick, do this. But, of course, it also requires that you have decent tape.
Challenge #3: Those Alarmpore (?) RGB+W strips are listed as having "3M Tape". No... they have, and I'm not kidding, "M" tape. Seriously. And it qualifies as tape. In that it's long and plastic, and as sticky as cassette or police tape. It doesn't stick. It doesn't even reliably stick to the LED strip, but the other side is seriously bad at holding the weight of the LED strip.
3M VHB tape is in an entirely different class. If you use this LED strip, you may want to at least in some places tack it up harder with 3M VHB. (Or use physical staples, not an option for me due to construction materials.)
This would have gone much easier if it was easier to determine what Hubitat actually supports (rather than the rather piddly list they provide), if it were easier to determine differences between controllers and if Amazon had a punishment system for mis-advertising adhesive. As it is...
I would have been better off with the Z-Wave RGBGenie controller (given the lack of Hubitat support for dual-SSID devices), and with replacing some segments of the RGB strip's tape with a better tape. But, once installed, Hubitat runs it fine.
