For years I've been happy with SmartThings, in its own way it's pretty great. Last week I was given a Hubitat Elevation out of the blue... a friend had bought it and decided it required more time than he was willing to spend. I thought it would be fun to play around with but pretty quickly I realized it had possibilities.
Again, I was a SmartThings guy and had no intention to switch platforms. But one test changed my mind, the accuracy of geofencing. I enabled my phone as a presence sensor on both systems Hubitat always reported my coming and going at least as quickly as ST, usually sooner. I consider presence the most important part of home automation so I started moving devices over, pretty sure I would stay on Hubitat. Then I was happily surprised by the latency improvement was when using local control. One automation in particular was noticeable, I have a button that toggles a set of lights throughout the house and locks a door. I hit this button before bed every night and had gotten used to a delay of 2-4 seconds. That doesn't sound like much but there was always that moment of thinking, "did it work?". Now it's not as instant as a hard-wired switch would be, but it's like 1 second or so. The lights go off while my hand is still on the button. Waaaay better.
So I would still say that SmartThings is a great platform, some of its features I miss already. But for the more accurate geofencing and lower latency, I'm very happy having switched.
Welcome! Just curious, what do you miss from SmartThings? First, there are a lot of apps available for HE so it's possible someone already created what you're looking for, second the developers of HE pay attention to these forums and seem pretty responsive to suggestions.
Thanks for this post. With the recent influx of Wink users and IRIS before them, it’s not too often lately that we get to read some good news, instead of complaints that things are not exactly like they were on platform X , and Hubitat should really drop everything and change direction to be just like platform X was or is.
They have a roadmap in mind, but it’s not following what every individual wants. I think that’s a tough thing to do, but it’s the right choice. They are very involved and are listening to requests, but they are not losing focus on their targets. No one is going to like an incapable hub that’s simple to use. I personally think they’re prioritizing things correctly.
Actually a lot of the things I miss in ST are probably already in HE, I've just yet to discover them. I wasn't happy to leave webCORE, I really liked that programming tool, but now I've got most of my apps made in Rule Machine and it's starting to grow on me. I'm sure after a week or two on Hubitat I'll find everything I need.
I too have read complaints on forums about these platforms. Maybe people need to manage their expectations; this stuff is for tinkerers. It has tons of capability, but if someone doesn't enjoy problem solving they're in for a frustrating ride. My experience has been great. I don't expect everything to be perfect all the time, and usually when it's not it's either because I did something wrong or it's a new problem that needs to be figured out. What could be more fun than that?
PS... is there a way to get the code for the stock HE drivers?
No.
Hubitat has a git repo at:
Which has everything they have made public...
However, those sources have given this Community a lot of hints as to what is "best" and the sources you can find will here in the Community will be a lot of help. Additionally, Hubitat staff will always answer questions with ideas or clarifications.
There's a Community Repo too where several code authors have their code.. theres' a lot of excellent work out there.
