Why Doesn't Hubitat (or Life) Work The Way I Want It To?

💬 Lounge
8

Related question: How many on HE use other platforms in conjunction with HE? So things like homekit, home assistant, node-red, zigbee2mqtt/ZHA etc?

I think the answer to this question kind of gets to @sburke781's original question. We all like HE, otherwise we would have gone home assistant by now. For many HE will be enough. But it can't do everything, although with the help of the community we've had drivers for things never thought possible before. If your new toy doesn't work with HE it may have been solved on one of the other platforms so use that instead until it is supported. With node red for example I've been able to do things with my cameras that will in all likelihood never be available on HE.

PS with HE as in life, if things don't work out, adapt and find a different route to your goal.

1 Like
9

Like others have expressed here, Hubitat does absolutely everything I need it to do. It just works!

That said, for new users, the initial setup experience and UI could continue to be improved. An example that comes to mind is the integration to the Lutron Pro 2 hub. No issues when it’s up and running, but getting there could be daunting to some…

And as much as I don’t use it, an improved dashboard would be great. Especially icons that can be moved without pressing arrows, more customizations, etc.

10

Yes, almost exactly this :point_up:except for NodeRed. Hate it. I’ve tried to accept it, but I just don’t like it. You can get that with Hubitat today if you’re not adverse to the NodeRed UI.

I’ve played with the Homey Advanced flows and they’re very good, but their capabilities are not as developed as Rule Machine is.

The thing about a different Rule UI is, it’s fine if you’re starting over, but all my rules are built and working the way I want. So unless I could move to Rule Machine 6.0 (or whatever Bruce wants to call it), with the Homey Advanced Flow type of UI, then changing rule engines just means more work for the exact same results I already have achieved.

11

My biggest complaint is that many bugs get discovered get acknowledged and then forgotten about and never fixed.

For example: When will they fix the fact that hub variable tiles on dashboards do not update on remote dashboards?

12

Link to thread?

13

Here's mine from May last year:

Here's an even older one from 2021:

14

Could try ; Smartly Inject .. On HPM
FINALLY! Hubitat Dashboard Drag and Drop - works like magic!

15

Yea, I have that on some of my dashboards. It works most of the time, but there was a while when it didn’t… I think that’s fixed now though…

16

While there are many things I'd change or fix in the Hubitat software I often think that my biggest problem is the devices themselves. Hubitat gives us the flexibility to use almost any device... But so many of them have weird issues, and you won't know that an issue might be a deal killer for you until you try it.

Then, you put groups of different devices together... like bulbs from different makers... and the fun really starts when they respond to commands differently. It takes a lot of research and some wasted money to pick the right hardware for your home.

It's not Hubitat's responsibility to fix the home automation industry ... But since they are on the front lines of the user experience, they are in the hot seat anyway.

2 Likes
17

I’m a HomeKit user. I initially got an HE to increase the number of local, non-Wi-Fi devices I can connect to HK. Initially I was going to simply bridge devices and do my automations in HomeKt. But eventually as I learned how powerful HE is, I started to do my automations in Rule Machine. Id love to get to the point where I can do all my automations in HE. But I have a number of Thread devices so I really can’t do it (I’m not keen on setting up a bevy of virtual switches and the complications that brings).

So what I’d really like to see is a Thread capable HE.

1 Like
18

  1. A "free form" math tool...I sooo would like to be able to just type something like
    (%var1%^2 + 2*%var2%)/3
    into a text box instead of what is currently available.

  2. More powerful native data/event logging (database) with visualization tools (aka graphing)

1 Like
19

It was actually somewhat of a rhetorical question :wink:

I have a lot of automations in RM. I also have a ton of them in node red and thanks to @fblackburn it's pretty easy to move back and forth to HE. In particular the function node is super powerful in allowing custom functions to be defined (much easier for me to learn json than groovy!)

influxdb/grafana work well for me (not native obviously)

20

What Thread devices you have paired to Apple Home? If these are Matter over Thread devices, you can bring and control them from Hubitat as well.

However, there are some Thread devices that are made especially for Apple Home and do not support Matter.

1 Like
21

Mine are pre-matter unfortunately. Let’s say I buy a new Matter over Thread device. How do I set it up in HE? Do i point HE to all my border routers (HomePods, AppleTV)? Then we’re adding WiFi as well as Thread to the communication dependency path, correct? Potentially several hops? Doesn’t seem to be on par with the direct-to-Zigbee/Zwave alternative. I suppose it’s not that much different than other hub-based systems like aqara and hue, but I’ve been trying to avoid that. In my ideal world HE would be a thread border router itself.

22

I keep seeing people linking to that silly Josh.Ai thing. It's a whole lot of gravy with no meat or potatoes.

I've watched their videos, it was basically nothing more than what the "Rooms" tab of Hubitat provides, but with a bunch of giant obnoxious stock photos and a ton of "UI shine" added to it. Functionally it seemed significantly worse than Hubitat, tbh. Then the other part of this Josh thing is basically just Siri.

Is Josh very shiny? Yep. Is it good for selling to rich people with more money than sense? Yep. Would I ever want it in my house? Not unless it was about 95% cheaper than it is. It looks like a great product for integrators to sell, but it doesn't look like a great product overall. It's just a big expensive manual control interface.

Wall mounted tablets functionally provide nothing more than a regular wall switch does, and they lack any sort of tactile feedback or ability to be used without looking, making them worse than a regular switch. Voice control is handy sometimes, but that's easily had with Hubitat via HomeKit (or Alexa/Google if you don't mind having all your personal data gathered and sold).

I really don't see the appeal of Josh other than to integrators looking to add $20k to their bill for someone's McMansion home "automation" system. Automation in quotes since Josh seems very very manual control oriented.

If I'm spending big bucks on something, I'll put the fanciest presence sensors available in every room, 'passage' sensors on every doorway, lux/color temp sensors in every room, having my lighting always be the same brightness and color temp regardless of what's being added to the room from the windows, and never ever touching the light switches again. I'm definitely not putting some stock photo filled tablet on the wall that's in every way worse than a light switch from 1900.

23

I feel like you're holding something back... how do you really feel?

:wink:

2 Likes
24
  1. I admittedly haven't read every post here.
  2. What really chaps me is when something works fine FOR YEARS (e.g., a custom driver), no changes have been made on my end other than updating the Hubitat firmware, but doing that renders something unusable.

This happened recently with my Daikin mini-splits. I used the only driver I could find that worked when I started using Hubitat (2021? maybe 2022). NOT a driver from @sburke781, but something (the only thing, at the time) that worked with my units. It was never perfect, but I could turn the units on and off, change the mode, and adjust the temperature. Good enough. Worked for years. Then one day after an HE firmware update (I think when I went to 2.3.8, but it's not like I log this stuff every day. Might have been the horror that was 2.3.6 (sicks) as well.), the dashboard tiles for my mini-splits, on two different hubs in two different buildings, stopped working. Oh, and I think they were fine under 2.3.7. The Rules still worked so I didn't notice it right away, but the dashboard tiles? Kaput. Sigh....... FINE BY ME IF YOU WANT TO JUMP ON THE LATEST AUTOMATION FAD, HUBITAT CREW, BUT HOW ABOUT NOT BREAKING STUFF YOUR EXISTING USERS - YOU KNOW, THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE ALREADY SPENT MONEY WITH YOU - ARE USING, AND DEPEND ON? When I or others have made this complaint in the past, we almost always hear something like, "Oh, that driver used the wrong [whatever] and was broken all along." Well, it worked for years, it's not like YOU were offering something with the "correct" [whatever] Hubitat, and so I used what I could get. I don't do this for a living, but YOU do. If you're going to offer a device that relies heavily on user-generated "software" (apps/drivers) to make it useful, it really needs to be a lot more fault-tolerant than what I've been seeing lately. <OK, rant over. That felt good.> And yes, I know I can roll back to whatever previous firmware. I just shouldn't be forced to do that, and be forced to lose potential security updates.

25

From a non-AV automation perspective Hubitat is as or more capable than dealer systems. And:

Control interfaces are still important to lots of people. It's an area that Hubitat has not focused on. Thus, the plethora of threads on alternative control frameworks. Lots are adequate. None are outstanding. Lots of people use Alexa/Apple/Google for voice. And they all are somewhere between suck and limited. Control4 and Josh.ai have the control stuff down, more or less. Especially AV. It's more than just pretty icons and tablets. It's about how everything works together.

I've got a Control4 system as well as Hubitat. Control4 is very good at controlling stuff, especially AV. They're one of the few options for hard button remotes with Harmony-type control. Their integration framework for controlling AV equipment is really quite good, especially for complex distributed/matrix AV sources. Technically, Control4 is about as much of a legacy system as one can think of, with all the plusses and minuses. Their UI works but is dated. How one builds the layouts is clunky and not flexible.

I don't know the technical framework of Josh.ai. My impression is that the AV stuff is not as advanced as C4, but is growing. I don't know anything about their automation capabilities. But their UI looks really nice and highly functional. The voice stuff seems good.

The dealer systems companies essentially do try to rip people off. The C4 8" tablet is about $1,200 and isn't any more capable than a $100 Lenovo/Samsung tablet. Nobody 'needs' tablets, but it is kind of nice to have a hub, somewhere. The companies add just enough proprietary functionality to get people to invest in the proprietary hardware.

Where these dealer systems struggle is making money. C4 is part of a public company, Snap One. And Josh.ai is VC funded. So they have formal profitability growth targets. They've focused on the narrow high end of the market, which limits growing by breadth. C4 is moving from an optional $150 annual fee (similar in scope to Hubitat's) to a mandatory $250 annual fee. Josh.ai has gone through revenue models and I think is now $720/year for 500 devices. But even the consumer brands struggle to make money, including brands such as Logitech, Amazon, Samsung.

I need some system to control my house, especially AV. I'm OK with C4, but I'd be tempted to dump them for Josh.ai. But not at the price they are charging. And of course, I'd need some way of managing the system myself. C4 offers that opportunity, not sure about Josh.ai.

26

I don’t understand the argument in favor of this viewpoint.

The platform develops and changes over time. It’s on community developers to stay current with those changes.

The alternative would be for Hubitat to delay or avoid making updates to their own platform. Not a viable alternative IMO.

3 Likes
27

I was going to have a lot of things to say at first, but then I realized you said Life and not Wife.

2 Likes