My SmartThings Hub is (slowly) starting to error out more and more. I’m doing a soft reset monthly to keep everything up ( I did a hard reset about a year ago when I moved), which works, but I think it’s time I start learning a new hub, preferably one not discontinued. My original plan was to put everything in Home Assistant when this time came, but a.) I really like it as my home coordinator with my custom scripts and addons and I don’t want to mess with what is working right now and b.) while I’m getting the hang of running zigbee on there, zwave is in progress and thread…not really working most of the time.
So. I need to buy a general all-protocol hub; any recommendations that are fully compatible with Home Assistant? One with custom scripting would be a huge plus; I miss doing that in SmartThings.
I have no suggestions for a hub that does what you want. However, Homeassistant does all of what you want and more.
If you have a box that HA can run on, just try it. You can integrate things you would not even expect. You can get the official Zigbee usb dongle from Nabu Casa or from anywhere you choose. Then just start pulling over one device at a time getting comfortable with HA. You can add a Z-Wave dongle, a Thread dongle, and more.
With Home Assistant the best place to start is to just get it running on your network and see all the stuff it finds on its own. Then get a Zigbee dongle and start moving things over as slow as you like. This is by far the best path rather than relying on some other hub that will eventually EOL and leave you hanging again.
Automations in HA are very easy, and coming from HomeKit, they are an absolute dream to work with.
Don’t wait to order something to get started with HA, just install it on whatever you have lying around or install it in a VM with VirtualBox if you have nothing else. Get used to it and then plan out how you want to go forward. If you find that you hate HA, it would be nice to know before you drop any $$$ on it.
I’ve been running Home Assistant for roughly five-six years (Pi, then Blue, now Amber and a second instance on my server for network integrations like nmap and netgear), but since my SmartThings hub was taking care of zigbee/zwave, until now I used HA as a coordinator for every smart device ecosystem I was using (Hue, Wyze, Ring, Blink, Alexa, August, Arlo, et al). Sorry that wasn’t clear.
While Ive started slowly adding zigbee devices directly, I haven’t started with zwave and thread isn’t working for me yet (OTBR is running but nothing sticks). And I really don’t want to have my hub fail and all my thread/matter devices useless when I don’t have anything that can access them.
z-wave may be easier than expected, as I think the devices stay linked to the hardware dongle used. (This is just from memory, mind!). But if you need to change the dongle, perhaps less fun.
imo, it will be a bit of pain to get everything inside HA, but once it’s done, you’ll be inside a platform that is pretty open, and commonly used, with lots of other people (hopefully) posting up solutions to problems before you encounter them!
And because it’s software that will run on pretty much anything, you have the reassurance that even if something crazy happened, you could just reinstall an old version.
If it were me, I’d clear an entire weekend day, power off the old kit, and work away at getting HA controlling everything.
Zwave is irritating to migrate, in theory the configuration is stored on the stick/radio but in reality it only stores some basic info and the pairing keys. You end up needing to re-interview everything for Home Assistant to know what it’s talking to. Last time I had to do it I ended up just resetting and repairing everything from scratch. I think the secure pairings in the newer Zwave revisions also has some quirks to migrate.
Oh, I backup religiously since Blue failed right after I moved and backup my backups on my laptop as well. (literally failed; I lost everything and had to run photorec and three other tools to pick out everything I’d done for the previous six months, since that I hadn’t copied to a backup on my server because I was prepping to move at the time).
So far, OTBR is the biggest stopping issue since HA runs it but nothing sticks. I admit, moving zwave is my actual biggest dread; zigbees I can do probably in a weekend, but zwave is such hell to unpair and re-pair (thought it makes up for it by sticking forever). That’s part of the reason I love Thread and Matter; they’re almost as sticky as zwave once they pair, and while pairing them is variable (sometimes fast, sometimes not so much) they repair themselves pretty consistently if the outage is under 24 hours and you can deliberately unpair them fairly easily.