So, I was making a transition to being more HomeKit oriented for the smart home. Hubitat was having issues, and the capability of redundant multiple standby hubs in HomeKit was appealing. So, I started to build out routines, swapped some items from Zigbee to HomeKit compliant Thread based ones, and was trying to make that work.

Long story short, it didn't last long.

It seems that every time there is a network interruption, like upgrading the router firmware, or an update to the HomePods themselves, things just completely go bonkers and I end up spending hours trying to get stuff back online and working. It doesn't matter how much redundancy and backup hub facilities you have if they just all break with an update or a passing change in the network infrastructure. Things needs to come back online once whatever it was has passed. Network is upgraded and comes back online, it should start working within seconds, not hours. If you upgrade the HomePods, or they automatically update, things should come back online in seconds or I'd even let minutes slide, but not hours.

So, I'm back to Hubitat as the main thing. Some changes from before are I disabled the native HomeKit integration and installed a community integration that pushes necessary items to Homebridge, and then on to HomeKit. It seems to be much more stable based on a month or so with it. And Hubitat has largely fixed their issues, which honestly, seemed to be related to the HomeKit integration being active. (The new Hubitat C-8 is still going through quite a bit of growing pains, though, so I'm holding steady with the C-7.)

But I also started playing a little more with Home Assistant. I've created a couple dashboards, integrated it with Hubitat using some community add-ons, and it's been great. The dashboards are more configurable than the standard Home app screens that you get with Apple's app. And it can integrate with the ecobee thermostat and Netatmo weather stations. These are cloud integrations, unfortunately, but they seem to work fine so far. And the dashboards are much more functional and aesthetically appealing than the Hubitat ones out of the box. Hasn't been too hard to get to where I am with it. I have not done anything to create automations in it as of yet, and not sure I'll need to, but the dashboards and adding in the needed integrations have gone pretty smoothly.

So, that's where I am right now. HomeKit has some things in the background that I'm not using much. Hubitat seems to be pretty stable. Home Assistant is working well for my limited use cases. Homebridge continues to be a rock. Kind of a Frankenstein-ish setup, but if you consider I'm not doing much with HomeKit, then it's actually really just Home Assistant and Hubitat. Mainly using sensors and other equipment that could be used with other systems like SmartThings or directly into Home Assistant if I ever get that far. I think I'm settling in, at least for a little while.

Unamused pooch waiting impatiently for the human to finish getting groceries.

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