What's your preference and why? For Home Assistant to work with Z-Wave / Zigbee / Matter I have to buy dongles, whereas it is all in one with Hubitat. Is there a pro and con to each? I feel like there is too much unnecessary redundancy.
My "main" one is the Hubitat, because it's pretty straightforward to program/use. The HA is a bigger PITA to learn and do stuff with, but there are tons more devices supported. I use a bridge to define devices in HA and bring them into Hubitat.
My "main" one is the Hubitat, because it's pretty straightforward to program/use. The HA is a bigger PITA to learn and do stuff with, but there are tons more devices supported. I use a bridge to define devices in HA and bring them into Hubitat.
I've been using a now ancient, C5 generation Hubitat since January 2020 (just barely pre-Covid). The choice at that time seemed easier: HA was (and perhaps still is) the hard core DIY/programmer's choice. The latest Hubitat C8 Pro seems like an even more capable system, tempting even for my light use case with better antennas and faster overall processing (and a few newer standards thrown in).
Overall though, I am pretty satisfied with my choice.
Currently running both a C8 Pro and a C8. I use the C8 to run OwnTracks and maybe a couple other things, while the C8 Pro has everything else. I also have a bit of a strange setup, as I have a Lutron Homeworks QS system in my house, so my use of Zigbee/Z-Wave/Matter is more limited than most...
I purchased Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 and Home Assistant Connect ZWA-2 to enable support for all protocols - its certainly overpriced for two distinct antennas. Would it have been better to sell my Home Assistant Green and Hubitat C7 and invest in a Hubit C8 Pro alone? I already have a Raspeberry Pi 5 with 16GB of RAM which can utilize Home Assistant. I use Pi Hole on a Pi 4 I have laying around. What are your thoughts?
I was using HomeSeer for years, but about a year ago, they wanted to go down the 'subscription' route if you wanted Alexa integration. At first I purchased an Aeotec (smart things) hub which works great for some of the new protocols (Z-Wave, Zigbee, Matter Gateway, Compatible with Alexa, Google Assistant, WiFi) and it was real easy to setup and works great with Alexa but it doesn't have some of the more advance features that HomeSeer or these other platforms have.
Some of my Z-Wave devices date back to 2009 (intermatic) and started developing problems so I looked into upgrading the Z-Stick and it made sense to go with the Aeotec Z10 Pro because it looked like I could upgrade my existing network without having to start over again from scratch - but due to firmware issues, it didn't work out.
Home Assistant has it's own os so it was very easy to get it up and running in a VM - using the Aeotec Z-Stick 10 ($60) but Alexa integration is lacking where I understand with Hubitat it is pretty easy to setup
Anyways the Home Automation dashboard is light years ahead of Home Seer but everything is pretty much still working and I have transitioned over many devices to Hubitat from HomeSeer
What I like about using a standalone Z-Stick is the software that can backup and restore the Z-stick so if your trying to add a new device and it goes sideways on you, I just restore the previous backup and try again
I run both. I have two Hubitat C5's and I run HAOS on a BMAX B4 Plus. I got into home automation in 2013 when Lowe's introduced their Iris system. Over the next 5 years I acquired a significant number of Iris zwave and zigbee sensors. In 2018 Lowes decided to discontinue supporting Iris and they offered to reimburse everyone for any device that couldn't be migrated into another system. Long story short they sent me a check for over $4K and let me keep all of the cameras and sensors I had purchased. In 2019 Hubitat started supporting all of the discontinued Iris devices so I purchased a C5 hub. I setup all of my Iris sensors and they have been working well every since. After a few years and adding another C5 to my system I started playing around with Home Assistant mainly because Hubitat's dashboards sucked and HA had a ton more to offer.
I still maintain both systems because HA doesn't support the old Iris V1 devices which I wanted to keep. I use the C5's mainly for the zwave and zigbee radios, but I also have a bunch of apps I created in Hubitat. If I didn't have so many Iris sensors I would probably dump Hubitat and just use HA. In my opinion Hubitat is good if you're just starting out, but if you want more advanced capabilities I would recommend Home Assistant.
Here have two Hubitat retired devices and two Samsung Smartthings devices that are retired, Tested running HA on an old Android TV box running Armbian Linux. It did well. It is said that the original base OS for Hubitat was Armbian Linux.
Did tinker with OpenHab and Node Red.
Software automation is always much more flexible than hardware automation. Just like BSD firewalls and NAS boxes.
Always a Homeseer user and still running Homeseer today. It works nicely with Home Assistant and not much of a Windows user today (more Linux)
The only hardware automation that I still run is the Leviton / HAI OmniPro 2 combo security / automation panel. There has never been or probably will be a better combination security / automation panel than the HAI and Elk stuff.
Still using UPB (X10 on steroids) mostly for in wall switches along with ZWave and Zigbee. Very happy running Tasmota firmware on ESP based WiFi devices. I like Zigbee more than ZWave and that is me.
There really is no best automation protocal. Its just what you are most comfortable using and what works best for you.
The PFSense box (Firewall) does everything I need it to do. Home network today is using Gb L2/L3 switches and Ruckus WiFi AP's. Mostly wired devices in the house.
Still using Squeezeplayer server (now Lyrion), Kodi multimedia boxes (at home and in the automobiles).
Use MQTT extensively and just starting to dabble with Matter. Used to use Microsoft SAPI for TTS/VR (voice font hoarder) and now using mostly AI / cloud fonts for speech and VR.
Personally I would rather buy the external antennas/dongles to integrate Zigbee/ZWaves, etc than have it "built in" to the automation hardware controller. The reason you don't need to purchase these dongles with Hubitat is because they are built into the Hubitat hardware. I consider that a negative, not a positive. Effectively you have to pay for the dongles everytime you upgrade your Hubitat hardware. I'd much rather pay for the dongles once and use HomeAssistant with whatever hardware I wanted (low powered or high powered). If I need to change/upgrade my hardware in the future for any reason, it would be a simple process because I can always move those dongles to another system and they will continue to work just fine.
Old Treatlife combo with Tasmota installed a few years ago. My fan / lights are using two separate load wires.
Currently using bottom light switch as a group switch to control switch plugs in same room.
Never found a similar looking fan / light switch combo.
This device now comes with a Wi-Fi module incompatible with Tasmota
01/14/2022 - module received from Amazon has ESP module, so some are still being sold. Had to hold reset button (very bottom of switch) while programming with 3.3v, GND, TX, RX, and GPIO0 wires soldered to Tuya board.
08/06/2021 - module just recieved from amazon contained Tuya WB3S module which cannot be flashed with Tasmota. That module is pin compatible with ESP-12 and can ordered via Ebay, or harvested from another board (I used an ESP8266MOD from a D1 mini). Once the ESP is swapped, you must pull GPIO15 low by connecting it to GND so that the ESP will boot.
What's your preference and why? For Home Assistant to work with Z-Wave / Zigbee / Matter I have to buy dongles, whereas it is all in one with Hubitat. Is there a pro and con to each? I feel like there is too much unnecessary redundancy.
For me it boiled down to how much free time I had to spend on home automation. I used HA in the beginning when I had more time to tinker with it. Now that outside commitments tie up all my time, I have Hubitat running everything. Hubitat is easy to use and takes very little time maintain. I'm sure it much better now, but in the past I was always rebuilding HA and troubleshooting issues. I moved over to Hubitat first on a C-5 then a C-7, and recently moved up to a C-8 Pro. All of them ran flawlessly without issues. Of course HA has better dashboards and more connectivity options, but if you don't have the time or motivation to fiddle with it Hubitat is the way to go. I'm keeping an eye on the new Homey hubs. It's too new to try out, but may be worth a look in the future.
Still have not converted above WiFi Switch to Tasmota...been tinkering with installing the tiny m5 ATOM echo in wall boxes using Russound ISSP Compoint speakers.
recently switched from smarthings to HA...HA is light years ahead in cababilities and flexibility...but, there is a learning curve that ChatGPT can help you through....so I'm all in on HA...and I also dumped blue iris and went to frigate, which integrates very nicely with HA....
