A long while back, I touted how nice Hubitat device was, and it really was great. I moved my entire home control system over to it. I added devices and was quite happy with the system.
Then, they came out with new hardware that was really compelling and I upgraded to it. The system offered a nice transition path from the old hardware to the new, and greater range and capabilities. I was stoked until some of my devices refused to work with it. All my old Iris stuff quit working, and I couldn't get my expensive Enbrighten Zigbee light switches wouldn't join. I contacted Hubitat about it, and of course, no one else was having the problems I was.
I even sent the device to them and they, of course, couldn't find any problem. But, I had an expensive piece of hardware that just wouldn't do the job for me. I was pissed when I found out that they intentionally excluded the Iris devices from being able to join the network! That was the important thing to me at that time; I had a lot of them from years past.
So, it was set up the old Hubitat to handle this Iris devices as well as the Enbrighten switches, and use the new Hubitat to handle new stuff as I expanded. The idea of holding on to an old controller just to support devices that I was already using didn't sit well.
There was also the possibility of replacing the devices that wouldn't join the Zigbee network, but that was expensive, and I have not found anything that worked and looked as nice as the Enbrighten wall switches. The Iris devices could be easily replaced with less expensive devices and new technology, so that wasn't a factor.
Or, I could drop the Hubitat and continue developing software under the system I brought up originally. That didn't set well with me because "Rolling my own" is a lonely path. It was great back when I started because IOT was still in its infancy and I was plowing new ground with every project. I had a lot of fun developing my own monitoring system for house power from the power company. It was also a lot of fun to get my air conditioning system under my complete control. However, that path diverged too far from what other people were doing.
What did I do? I took the old Hubitat and used it as a Zigbee controller and brought up Home Assistant on an Intel NUC that I picked up on Ebay for a fraction of the price of the newest Hubitat. Then started to work setting up controls and monitors all over again.
That actually worked pretty well as a system, but I had a LOT of devices that I built up using the Digi XBee that was pre-Zigbee, and I wanted them in the system also. So, I interfaced them into Home Assistant using MQTT. Eventually, I wound up with two Intel NUCs, the old network and the new all Zigbee network.
Everything worked, and I had a new system that supported everything and anything new I wanted to try. I went a little nuts and spent many days on dashboards, automations, helpers and such until I really had the house fine tuned to what I liked and how I wanted things to work here in Arizona. Then, using the mqtt interface in Home Assistant, I moved my code to the second NUC and got rid of the Hubitat entirely.
The Hubitats are sitting on a shelf somewhere totally ignored now. I'll never go back to that route again. See, what had happened was that I had missed out on the incredible progress of Home Assistant. It has Zigbee to MQTT integrated, so new Zigbee devices can be integrated into Home Assistant with a little work, and that is an awesome feature for automation and monitoring the house. Then, I tried out the ESP32 devices; that gave me the ability to create something that didn't exist on the market, and I was back in the heaven of exploring new ideas and implementing new ways of controlling things. Different platforms, but way cheaper and much more capable than the Arduino, Raspberry Pi evolution of the IOT field.
Thus, the last four or so years has been an exploration and implementation of catching up with IOT, and doing my own thing around the house. I decided to wake this blog up again and share my exploits and failures because there is an audience out there that wants to see what the reality is and what is possible without spending their entire life pawing through a forum being insulted for asking stupid questions or watching endless out of date videos enduring ad after ad to see how something could be done under some old release.
I hope you enjoy my experiences as much as I have. You do your own thing for your environment, and I'll keep poking and experimenting, sharing what I've already done, and what I'm working on now.
Oh, and I'll probably throw in a tractor, excavator, skid steer or rock moving story along the way.
Dave.
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