What's Next for HE?

I’m all for this mentality, and knowing this about the Hubitat team, I was hoping to come to this thread and see RAMPANT, WILD, HILARIOUS speculation about what could be next!

Massive hardware expansion! Hubitat-branded contact sensors, motion sensors, cameras, light bulbs, door locks, etc!

Crazy business acquisitions! Hubitat buys out Wink, Iris, Aeotec, Inovelli, Sengled, and more!

AI for everything! A true “smart” home that learns everything about you and only uses it to make your life better! And somehow does it all locally, no cloud required!

I have tried to use it and I got it to login once. Than it would give me a Java error when I tried to add the plug. Rebooted and still had a Java error. So removed the driver and reinstalled no more Java error but now it’s not showing any devices to add or remove. I’ll play with it again later. I have 4 plugs I would like to get working but weighing my time vs cost to replace.

You might consider posting the issues you’ve encountered to the Tp-link KASA thread that @SmartHomePrimer linked to, so @djgutheinz gets to see them, and possibly provide you with a solution.

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I'm pretty much okay with where HE is right now.

But let me give a little wishlist...
If anything I wish the built-in dashboards where much nicer. They are really basic in the design department and somewhat clunky to interact with. Smartly makes it a bit nicer but even that is just an inch closer to a nice looking design and not a full step.

My vote would be for you to hire a solid designer to build a nicer interface for the dashboard. Ideally something easily skinnable, I don't mind the smartly approach with an external program that reskins the dashboard. But move the goal post far forward in the design department and create a proper design language.

My few cents

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I might. To be honest I’m not too thrilled with them being WiFi. They’re just more devices that suck up resources on an already congested band. I don’t like that they are cloud based even though they can be used locally with hubitat that could go away with a firmware update. I bought them to control a lamp after SmartThings crapped out and they were cheap on Amazon. Now that I have found a superior alternative to SmartThings i think I would be better served with either zigbee or zwave.

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Sounds like it. I wonder if they will do a c7 plus box that has features some users want like POE

I don't get the connection between a smarhome hub and PoE. Unless I don't know what POE is.

PoE = Power over Ethernet
Just removes the need to have a wall wart power plug as the hub can be powered over the network cable.
I hate MicroUSB so anything that does away with that connector is GOLD to me :slight_smile:

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I feel like the concept of rooms could make so many parts of the system a little bit easier, including apps like motion lighting as well as dashboards. It could help people more easily manage their devices and allow the UI provide more likely devices to select when setting up rules, etc. It may also open up the possibility for pre-buikt / dynamic dashboards based on rooms defined.

I'll admit the return in the dashboard space is probably quite low, just a nice-to-have

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Agreed, I think this would make life for noobs much easier.

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Yeah, the more I think about it, setting up a device could include adding a bulb to a room which would add it to a pre-built group of lights for the room, adding a motion sensor would add it to a pre-buikt motion zone for the room, similar for contact sensors, etc.

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This is brilliant. I moved to HE after being "into" home automation for 15 years or so, but never learning to code (just too many other competing priorities). I started with Homeseer but primarily used the ISY-994 (starting with the 99, so that was a long relationship). But the company that offers that device, and the user community around it, never seemed to understand that making it easier to use the device was the secret to growth, and that as you made things easier for beginners you made things simpler for everyone, if you approached this wisely. Their devices were incredibly reliable, but the interfaces were just not built for beginners, or a mobile-centric world. In contrast, I've been really happy with my HE devices and the recently launched services seem reasonable, and reasonably priced. I'll likely use one or more of them. Most importantly, I already find the user interface (dashboard capability) to be far superior to my previous platform, which was a big complaint I had with their system. Additional focus on the dashboard would be great (make it easier to move things when adding/deleting new things, perhaps), but trust me, it's already better than many others.

Continuing to make it easy to use the platform can be done without sacrificing the needs of more experienced users , and I'm glad to see this approach. And finally, I've found the user community here to be polite, courteous, and lacking the "snarkiness" found on so many other "geek-centric" forums . Thanks to everyone for that, as well. It's a pleasure to use this hub, and participate in this online community.

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Very true, I'm one of those technical users that abhors a poor quality UX / UI. Just because I started using computers using MS-DOS 2.11 and like Unix/Linux, doesn't mean I'll tolerate a poorly thought out and illogical UI / Workflow.

A good example of this is my early Vera experience - I soon discovered the total non-existence of any useful automation capability in Vera and PLEG was put forth to me as the answer. So I bought it, installed it, got pi$$ed off and frustrated, read the manual, got even more pi$$ed off and frustrated, and promptly deleted it from my hub 4 hours later!

Thankfully @toggledbits had just released Reactor which saved my a$$ from being shot by my wife for "wasting" $300 Aussie Peso's on a useless piece of junk (Vera Plus).

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Why make it as rigid and defined as "rooms" though?

I think they just need to add metadata tags to assets + view filtering. Then people can tag, group, view things however they want.

If they want it to group by rooms, add a tag for the "room name".

If they want it by function, then add that tag. If they want it by type, then add that tag.

Or all of those - can have more than 1 tag.

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Thread? (pretty please!) :stuck_out_tongue:

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For all those thread devices you can but right now? :wink:

I think waiting on thread until it is more common and available is a better move with their limited resources.

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I think both are valid and worthwhile. Having a flexible tag option opens it up to those users who have varied needs when it comes to grouping devices. If you want something that is built in and part of the way the HE system works, then I feel you need a dedicated "tag" that the HE system can refer to, at least for the kind of functionality I am after.

I also wouldn't want to get hung up on the term rooms, I'd be open to that being something more generic or open to the users choosing. But, like I said, a built-in grouping mechanism could open up so many opportunities for the system itself, not just a generic user-driven tagging option, which I would also support.

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Well the fact that licensing is free and for the most part, if it works directly with home kit, its got thread in it (for the most part reiterated) I would think this would be a good way to compete with apple by directly supporting a lot of home kit compatible products and get some other fun gadgets to add. Though i don't know what's required software wise or hardware wise.

Not necessarily. I'm a Groovy novice, but what I've read leads me to believe that you can use Java classes in Groovy code. Yet, if I do something like this:

import javax.net.ssl.*
...
def sslsocketfactory = SSLSocketFactory.getDefault();

I get an error and the code won't compile. Again, not a Groovy expert but I don't see any syntactical errors in that one statement, so there must be some restrictions on what you can and cannot do in the context of a HE device driver.

Agreed - Would be a very nice powerful feature for the UI. I have been requesting tags for a couple of years now. Never got a good response (or I missed it) but assumed they were too busy handling the more critical/necessary stuff or it was something they just weren't interested in for whatever reason.

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