Controller Suggestions?

Scenes in HomeAssistant are awesome. You just need to familiarize yourself with the event viewer - then you can easily write any automations you want.

The event viewer (Developer Tools > Events) lets you start a listener and see all events bieng sent to HA. If you know the name of the you can enter it, but if not you can just wildcard (*) and listen for all events coming in. So this is what it looks like when I listen for all events, and hit a button on my switch;

On the first line there you see event type. You can copy that and go back and update the filter to show only those events. Once you have the event into, you can go and use that as your automation trigger;

In the automation, you can add way more stuff to event data if you want, but really all that’s needed is the mininum info to be able to determine a unique event. In this case, label is more than enough since every action will produce a unique value. Node is also needed because that determines the actual zwave device sending the event (like if you had multiple light switches, each would have a different node).

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Hi,
About 1 yr ago I had same question. I was setting up new house and my list of contenders was similar to yours with exception of ST. I like my data and my system to stay home as much as possible. Also there are some videos on You Tube comparing response of ST to other controllers and ST has significant lag. At the time I was leaning into Home Assistant but I did ask this community for controller recommendation, few came up but Hubitat came up more then others. I did go with it and I have to say it was good choice.
What I like about it is following

  • local execution
  • low power
  • small size
  • no noise
  • easy to configure
  • works like a appliance, no need to thinker with it.
  • very configurable
  • wife approval
  • very good if not best supported controller here with inovelli devices
  • hubitat forums I find very good too.

There is really nothing that I can think of that I don’t like.
If I have to do it over I will still go with HE.

I’m using this with 40+ inovelli dimmers and switches. Kwik z-wave deadbolt. Soon I will be connecting wired door sensors and z-wave motion detectors

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A little over a year ago I switched from ST to HA. Things with well for a couple of months, and then zwavejs came into the picture, which has been nothing short of a disaster. I’ve even bought new controller hardware and gone as far as starting HA from a fresh start. I’ve spent countless hours trying to get it to work properly. I have a degree in Computer Engineering and have been a systems programmer for two decades. This should not have been this hard. I finally got things mostly working last fall, but HA updates keep breaking devices, and the developers have little care about supporting zwave devices more than a couple years old. Automations that I’ve manually disabled keep getting enabled when even a minor HA update is done. And now my thermostat’s zwave communication is dead in the water again which will require some gymnastics to get it working again.

Getting any sort of decent support in HA for Inovelli is not straightforward. And updating device firmware in this mess is not something I’ll be trying any time soon, as it requires significant effort to even get to a place where a firmware update can even be attempted.

I will soon be trying Hubitat. Here’s hoping.

@tlunsf lots to unpack here.
By all accounts, zwavejs is miles ahead of openzwave. It’s a fully open source project and evolving very rapidly. There is a known bug right now in 700 series controllers, but that is not on the zwavejs side it’s in the firmware of the controllers itself.

As far as HA developers supporting devices that are more than a couple years old, that doesn’t really have to do with HA developers at all. So I wouldn’t expect them to. You should be looking to the team that’s working on developing for zwavejs, or even the manufacturers of those devices. I have lots of devices, both new and old, working great on zwavejs.

The automations re-enabling themselves seems very odd. I can’t recall ever reading about this, and a very quick google search and search on the HA site doesn’t seem to turn up much. I can’t really weigh in on this one as I use node-red for all of my automations on HA. I personally find it much easier than trying to write them out in YAML, but as a systems programmer for 2 decades I can only assume your skills in that area are much more advanced than my own :slight_smile:

What I can say from experience is that updating device firmware through zwavejs is an absolute breeze!
-Step 1 is to install the zwavejs2mqtt addon. I’m a firm believer that every zwavejs user should have this addon installed. You don’t need to utilize the mqtt part and can connect directly to the home assistant web socket server.
-After you have zwavejs2mqtt installed, literally all you need to do is click on your device, click on advanced, click on begin firmware update and select the file. It’s like 5 clicks of the mouse, that’s it that’s all. Takes between 10-30 minutes per device.

Here’s a screenshot showing the begin firmware update feature.

As an ST user that went to Hubitat, I can say it’s not without it’s own set of issues. My personal opinion is that the hardware it’s running on is not powerful enough to handle any complex automations. I was plagued with lockups, slowdowns, constant reboots, etc… The more I threw at it, the slower things got and the more frequent the reboots needed to be. It’s often blamed on custom device handlers and custom apps, and the suggestion is to stick with the default handlers to fix the problem. But doing so you sacrifice most of the advanced features the devices you’re using are capable of. Do a search through the hubitat community and you’ll see countless people running 2, 3, even 4 hubs to separate things out and keep things running smooth. At least with HA you can choose your hardware and make it as cheap or as powerful as you wish.

I’m still sticking with HA, but I have had similar frustrations.

Our setup is at a second home, and I have no idea why, but every few months I show up and things are all out of whack. Dimmers stopped working…nodes have failed, lights are randomly on.

It has been rather frustrating…although in the last few months, things have stabilized a bit more.

@anikkar have you ever considered using the remote_homeassistant custom component? It will let you link 2 HA instances together so you could monitor your second home remotely.

I’ve been using HA for 3-4 years and switched to zwaveJS2MQTT about a year ago after using openzwave before that. It’s always worked fine for me. I haven’t had any sudden HA failures since I quit trying to run it on a zpi and switched to using the container version less than a year in.

Inovelli devices are well supported in zwaveJS2MQTT and updating the 2nd gen Inovelli devices is simple with zwaveJS2MQTT.

HA does have breaking changes, but it’s never broken too much at once. Usually it’s just an integration that changes and you have to change how you use it.

Thanks for all the replies.

I had zwavejs2mqtt working on one of the iterations of full resets that I did. I had some issue that I forget now that led me to asking questions on the HA forums. HA core developers highly recommended that I go with zwavejs (no MQTT), since it’s the “recommended” path. Things went reasonably well on that path for a few weeks, but over time enough breakage and need to hack at things has pushed me to look for other options.

Regarding the older devices, I had a working system until zwavejs. I think it was a huge mistake to push HA users to zwavejs until full parity was available. I just wish that I had spent all the wasted hours on HA zwavejs working at a paid job instead, as I could have paid someone many times over to make things work well.

In favor of HA, it is a fantastic, flexible architecture. In a year or two nobody else will be even close to it in feature set. However, I’m done until things stabilize. I ordered my Hubitat today.

They’re not wrong. Even with zwavejs2mqtt it is recommended to use zwavejs no MQTT (how’s that for confusing? LOL). zwavejs is integrated directly into HA. Think of zwavejs2mqtt simply as a GUI for zwavejs when connected via websocket to the integrated zwavejs. The thing is, zwavejs2mqtt can also function independently of zwavejs and use MQTT to communicate, which adds an extra layer which is why it’s not recommended.

As someone who has moved through pretty much all of the major platforms with the exception of Homekit, I can say they’re already at a point where nobody else is even close to it in feature set. Where you’ll see the biggest growth over the next year or 2 on the HA platform won’t be adding “new” features, but it will be in making those features more accessible and user friendly. Every month more and more integrations and features are moving away from YAML configuration into the UI. Good luck on HE, as much as I found it struggled for me it would still be my #2 choice of all the platforms I’ve used.

Another option for you, which I’m a huge fan of, is connecting all of your devices to Hubitat and then using the Hubitat Custom Component to bring them all into Home Assistant. This was one of my most solid setups. With no automations or apps on the Hubitat hub it was very snappy, and devices were very stable using the Hubitat zigbee and zwave radios. Then I built out all the automations in Home Assistant and setup the lovelace dashboard. So I let each platform do what they did best and it was great. I’d likely still be setup this was if my Hubitat didn’t start crapping out on me.

have you ever considered using the remote_homeassistant custom component? It will let you link 2 HA instances together so you could monitor your second home remotely.

@MRobi, How is this different than NabuCasa (Home Assistant Cloud)…or is it?

I made an emergency purchase of a Hubitat C5 when I saw the implosion of Wink (corporation) approaching. It has worked for my needs. Every one of their frequent updates seems to break something, and I loathe applying them because of the lack of basic QA/QC.

During my holiday break last month, I spun up a HA OS virtual machine to see what it is all about. It does have a sizable learning curve, but supports stuff out of the box that Hubitat doesn’t even have from community-written stuff yet. One important thing that I found in the HA forums was that someone had reverse-engineered the API for our electronic dog door, and that it could be locally controlled via wifi. Took me less than an hour to slap together a Q&D shell script to control the door from HA, along with a sensor to see when the door opens so that I can fire an automation to turn on the outside light when the dog does out after dark.

Long story short, I have a 500-series Z-Wave USB stick and spare Inovelli Z-Wave bulb connected via zwave2mqtt, and they seem to be working fine. I am planning to bring over an LZW-36 that’s not using any Hubitat automations over to HA later today. If that goes well, I will likely be phasing Hubitat out over the next few months…

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@anikkar NabuCasa supports 1 instance of HA. So if you have 1 at home and 1 at a 2nd home, you need 2 instances of NabuCasa. Or of course you can setup free remote-access through your own domain name or duckdns, etc… This way as well you’ll be constantly switching accounts in the app.

The remote_homeassistant custom component links multiple instances together into 1. So if you’re a NabuCasa user you only need one account. You can configure separate dashboards and just flip pages back and forth, or put your key devices on 1 dashboard.

@vreihen Check out the Hubitat custom component. It will help ease the transition as it will bring all the devices connected to your Hubitat into HA for control there. You can do it more gradually without having to blow up your entire smarthome and start from scratch all at once.

Thanks, but I truly don’t want them to ever see each other. No way do I want to see HA catch “cooties” from Hubitat. :laughing:

On the subject, I moved my first LZW36 fan/light switch over this afternoon. Am I going crazy, or does the Lovelace Dashboard really not have a fan card built in out of the box???

Not a good one that I’ve seen. Most just use a custom button card and configure it to how they like. I personally use Dwains Dashboard and there’s a fan addon for that.

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@MRobi I see what you’re saying. I actually have Control4 at home (separate topic on my feelings about C4), so this is the only instance of HA.

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Just FYI, if you put initial_state: false at the start of your automation after the alias and before the trigger lines it will be turned off after a re-start.

I actually had automations turned off after a re-start once a long time ago so I put initial_state: true in all my automations.