Random Odds and Ends

Since I used to write a lot about my smart home setup, thought I’d try to get back into the swing of blog posting by revisiting this tired and thoroughly unentertaining topic.

I had been almost exclusively using Home Assistant for almost a year, but some Zigbee things were kind of…off. The occasional delay or nonresponse. I have it running in a virtual machine on proxmox (free), and while proxmox is great and all that, I have concerns there, too. I thought about a move to a docker container on Ubuntu or Debian or something, and to do that I’d need to run more containers for the Matter, Z-Wave, and I don’t know what else that exist as add-ons in the OS version. It just wasn’t going to be an easy migration.

So I ended up going back to Hubitat for at least the radios. (There was a brief dalliance with Aqara, but it didn’t last more than a few weeks.) It seems to do a pretty good job in managing all the Zigbee (not aqara) and Z-Wave devices. But Z-Wave on Hubitat is a little less reliable than it was on home assistant. Hubitat is in the process of migrating to the newer ZWaveJS backend from a now unsupported and deprecated ZIP implementation. There are growing pains. But it’s nothing too major.

I removed all the indoor Ring contact sensors and replaced them with Aeotec multipurpose sensors, which are not only easier to pair and track in Hubitat than the Rings, but are also more responsive. I’ve been pretty happy with them. I’ve been reducing the number of Z-Wave devices when I have Zigbee equivalents. They just work. And I share all these devices to Home Assistant via an integration from HACS.

As far as automations, most are still in Home Assistant, but I’m slowly replicating and activating them in Hubitat. Not really a pressing matter as long as they’re working in one of the solutions.

Dashboards are still pretty much Home Assistant. The Hubitat dashboards just aren’t great unless you want to put in time learning and editing CSS code. It’s the main thing that keeps me in Home Assistant in some capacity. That and some integrations just work better from Home Assistant I’m going to give SharpTools a shot, but since it’s not local, I don’t want to have to depend on it.

So that’s the state of things right now. Using Hubitat for all the Z* radio related things, and I’m slowly moving automations over to it from Home Assistant. Both will remain part of my smart home setup for some time.

So where does Apple Home (HomeKit) come into play? Well, I have a docker container of Homebridge running that I use push Hubitat stuff to HomeKit, but overall it’s an afterthought. It has just never been that reliable, and I’m hesitant to trust it for anything. And the automation capabilities pale in comparison to either Hubitat or Home Assistant.

Photo credit: my wife