Happy Saturday Everyone! I'm now three weeks in, and the Zigbee connection is waaaaay more stable than my Conbee stick. If you're interested in picking up a new Hubitat C8 Pro, then get one here! : BUY THE NEW HUBITAT C8 PRO HERE: hubitat.com/products ***EDIT*** I don't know why this video has ruffled so many feathers 😂 So many people think they have the right answer, none of them know what my walls are made out of, how close my Pi is to my router, how many wireless signals are floating through the air, whether my issue is because I'm using a pi or because I'm using a conbee stick, what zigbee devices make up my mesh, whether I should be using ZHA OR Zigbee2MQTT, no one can agree if I should be using a Sonoff stick or an ethernet based sm something or other... But one thing is for sure, everyone is positive that my working solution is wrong 🤣 Then there are the folks saying I shouldn't be comparing a software solution such as HA to a hardware solution such as Hubitat...I'd be a rubbish RUclipsr if I didn't, people need to know whether to buy a Pi and a zigbee stick or a Hubitat don't they?? Some of the condescension has been amazing too 😅 I don't really understand where you think I didn't take "responsibility to understand my hardware", the conbee stick like any other is pretty much plug and play, and Zigbee is supposed to be a self healing, mesh protocol. What more should I have known? I ought to be able to plug it in and use it. I bought it on the recommendation of HA users that at the time were aggressively yelling at me for not having one because it was "flaw less". 2 years later the same aggressive fan boys are telling me it's garbage 🤷♂️ If you want to make an informed decision as a first time user of home assistant, from what I gather the Raspberry Pi is now considered trash (despite being the recommendation of the official home assistant website), you now need to install it on a NUC, and buy some dedicated ethernet zigbee radio, all of which will be REALLY easy to implement I'm sure 🤣... Or you know, do what I did, and use Home Assistant on a Pi for your main interface and Hubitat for your signals. My way has a lot more options should you decide to switch down the line to one or the other full time.
What you are doing is more remote control than home automation. Just ignore the app. Also for doing rules, do it on a PC... Much easier. Also not the best use of modes. You could do what you do in scenes. Modes would be if it's evening then this is available but if it's day it's not..
What I'm doing day to day is having presence sensors control my lights, but hubitat doesn't support them. I can only conduct a "remote control" style review if I can't find enough things to actually integrate. Hence my moan at the end of the video
You asked for it. Running HAOS supervised in a VM as a docker image.... like THE method that is NOT advised on all the documentation. Once HACS was actually successful installed it has been perfect since...... but I'm not saying that's how it will work for everybody lol.
Paul, the problem with your ZigBee range is the Conbee stick. If you got a ZigBee coordinator with an antenna larger than a finger nail then that would work too. Come on.
Totally agree. You pick a smart home server based on the hardware it supports and it's overall capabilities, not based on a third party antenna that you happened to connect to it.
yeah, for the same price he could have gotten a sonoff. Mine works great. He could have also just beefed up this mesh with a couple of well placed zigbee wall sockets
If zigbee range is your only issue, why don't you switch out your conbee stick for something better? Best part of HA is choice, and we can make good and bad ones 😅 It's been a long time since I tried Hubitat, thank you for showing how it's coming along though, I'll be sticking with HA too!
I've been using Hubitat for about 4-5 years now, and I really love it. That said, I had to stop relying on it as my main automation engine because my C8 (non-Pro) model struggled with all the processing. Now, I use Hubitat primarily for my Z-Wave and Zigbee devices and have integrated it with Home Assistant. This setup lets me decide where I want my automations, depending on what's easier-sometimes I use Home Assistant, and other times Hubitat. It's the best of both worlds!
I've been on Hubitat for years (love the lack of attention I have to give it), but sometimes see something on HA that is interesting. How was the integration process? Do device names transfer? What about rooms? Do you have a dashboard with either?
Clearly it's an HA ecosystem problem, if a very technically adept user such as Hibbert ended up with a poor performing Zigbee stick and struggled with it, and if the fix wasn't obvious, then that's an issue.
@@matthewpoplawski2603 maybe, but if the hardware doesn't work correctly it is not HA s fault. I switched from conbee to sonoff because it has a bigger antenna
I waited years for Hubitat to fix the integration I needed and add the others I also needed until I was ready to give up on smart homes altogether in frustration. I've now switched to Home Assistant and am very happy, very few problems, almost everything just works.
Exactly - the Raspberry Pi was not designed or intended for mission-critical applications like home automation and security. They are great for experimentation and learning, and for non-production uses like entertainment scenes, discretionary lighting routines, and feeding aircraft data to FlightRadar24, but I would never trust a Pi with my garage door, front door lock, HVAC control, or a decent Spousal Approval Factor. Plus, mini-PCs and NUCs are better able to handle, and expand with, the increasing computing requirements of Home Assistant, such as voice and AI.
Changing to a different Zigbee stick, and potentially changing the channel, would probably fix all the issues. You may be running into interfere with your wifi 2.4G as well since zigbee uses the same frequency space.
I’ve had Hubitat for years, since the first C4 and then up to the 8 Pro. All the while linking them to HA, but I don’t do any automations on either, I use NodeRed for that. I just prefer to keep the automations away from the systems controlling the hardware. It’s super fast and reliable. The Hubitat forum is the best around, not many jerks to point out the noob in the room. And always very helpful. Brilliant vid Paul!! 👏👏
The frustration zigbee devices that don’t work very well is familiar to me. But since I bought 4 wall socket plugs my mesh zigbee network is finally perfect. I placed one at my server, one in my bedroom then I placed one downstairs in the living room and one in my kitchen. The result is two that cover back side of the house at ground floor and upper floor and the same idea at the front side of the house. Got 100% stable zigbee coverage
Apology NOT accepted, I have two kids and still managed to sort out my smart home hubs….. the kids are in drawers somewhere but at least my lights come on automatically at sunset.
I moved from c7 for all the reasons you describe at the end. Understand the cloud reluctance from hubitat but most of the kit (tv,wifi,sat box etc) isn't available with zigbee or local . I switched 75 devices in 2 hours with all automations done. I can now use unfi as geofencing and turn off tv directly with no motion or get ring or blink cameras as outdoor sensors (much easier). Even basic dashboards much better on home assistant. You mention lights coming on together. That is also a hubitat problem when you move from controller. What I'd love HA to do is to be able to have a cluster of zigbee controllers where devices can connect to one zha or z2m especially for concrete houses. That would be a game changer. A poe controller each end of house and maybe in garage to give better coverage as mesh can sometimes have issues.
For Aqara, you can do a basic Aqara implementation using Matter. There’s then a community matter bridge plugin you add. After doing that a basic implementation of all the Aqara devices came in.
Oh that is interesting!! I asked hubitat about this and they said THEY were still writing the drivers so it could find the devices. Surprised to hear the community have written something!! Does the fp2 work!?
@@paulhibbert There's drivers available for the fp2, but you can't get the zones to function since it's heavily reliant on the Aqara app. I route the fp2 from the Aqara app to Amazon Alexa and use the Alexa integration in Hubitat with a virtual device (switch+motion) & 2 routines in Alexa (why they still haven't allowed for the ability to do 2 functions on a switch yet, I have no idea). I tried through Google Home first, but for some reason it was triggering all zones when 1 zone went off...another thing Google Home did poorly, go figure. With that, I use the built-in Motion and Mode Lighting App. There's other drivers for Aqara zigbee sensors, buttons, and the like that you can download through Hubitat Package Manager (HPM). They're not perfect due to Aqara using proprietary zigbee hardware, but they work. Search for Aqara. :) And the sexy cat robot camera hub hooks in to the Hubitat through Matter, so if you have your Aqara ecosystem purely in the Aqara app, you can manage it in the Hubitat that way.
This is awesome, thank you Paul! I have a Hubitat C8 that I was considering tossing because I couldn't really get it to do anything. If it would integrate with Aqara...that would be amazing! Thank your for your videos. Thank you for communicating with these companies about what we are all looking for in our systems. You rock brother! Also, congrats on becoming a dad!
Thanks so much dude! Someone in the comments said that there is a community driver to make aqara stuff work using hubitats matter connectivity, so that could be interesting!
@@paulhibbert I wrote a thing that integrates Aqara stuff with Hubitat, but you're not going to like it. 😅 It uses Zigbee2MQTT to, erm, convert Zigbee to MQTT, which my driver then interprets. You'll find it in the community Hubitat Package Manager if you're interested. Sadly it's the only way I've found to make Aqara devices reliable.
Hey Paul, Firstly... love your videos! Some people already mentioned it, your problem is not the HA, it's your Conbee stick , plus, and this is really importantant... Make sure your stick is not plugged in into USB 3 port, use USB2 port(!), and one more plus... even more important... you MUST use an USB extension cable, you must NOT plug in your coordinator directly into your Pi. It won't work properly. Do all this and make sure you're using a good zigbee/2.4 wifi channel combo and I can guarantee you that your stuff will be Swift as Taylor However, if Hubitat works for you, stick with it. To me, it seems like very lite version of HA. Best Tee
Great video, thanks for posting! Of course, this sent me deeper down the rabbit hole on what to do in the new house we’re moving into. I’ve been in my current house for 22 years, and the extent of my home automation is a SmartThings hub and a handful of Z-Wave switches/sensors. For the record, I was into X-10 30+ years ago . Since the light switches in the new place are rocker style, I will be leaving all of my rocker smart switches in this house. This means, it’s ALL brand new at the new place (woohoo)! My rabbit hole adventures led me to White Series Inovelli switches and I was thinking Home Assistant as the hub (I have several Raspberry Pis for many things currently and figured, what the heck, what’s another one). Then I see this video and the Hubitat option…somebody save me. The extent of my current automation is just scheduling outdoor lights from dusk to dawn. However, I’d like to kick things up a notch and that’s my thinking to go with Inovelli switches. My actual question: Is the Hubitat with Inovelle White Series switches a good choice out of the gate in the new house? If so, how long should it take for the Inovelli switches to come back in stock? I am moving in 2 weeks, if it’s too long, what would be a good short term solution?
I started my smart home with Google and quickly figured out I needed more. I picked hubitat c8 and I love it. I have found work arounds for most things that are wifi only via virtual switch's linked to Google home. But I've been wanting aqara stuff for a long time! I look forward to that integration!
Maybe I don't know enough about how ZigBee is intended to work but I thought that the range of the ZigBee dongle is important but ZigBee also works like a mesh so the network can handle growth as long as there are enough devices in the network that can support the mesh
This is true but the more hops to get to a device, the slower the response. the higher power allows it to speak louder and each device can hear it better. so they don't necessarily need t hop through the mesh.
Thanks gents, these are both good points. This is another complaint I have about home assistants handling of my mesh. A lot of devices were meshed to stuff at the other side of the house. I ended up trying to re-pair them directly to their closest neighbour but it STILL kept going back and meshing to stuff that was miles away. No matter what I did the connection was intermittently poor an d here didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it.
@@paulhibbert HA doesn't handle the meshing, that is done by the Zigbee radio, your Conbee Stick, internally. There is also an important quirk of Zigbee networks you may not be aware Paul: A lot of Zigbee devices like those from Aqara for example don't re-pair to another signal source. Ever. Unless you do a hard reset and remove them from the network. They will simply try to work with the first connection they made. So if you test a sensor in say your office, and the move it to the living room, that sensor will keep trying to connect to whatever repeater had the best signal in the office instead of finding a better signal elsewhere. So it's best to bring a sensor to where ever you want it installed before activating and adding it to the network.
I’d highly recommend getting the sonoff zigbee dongle with a small usb extension lead and a good antenna. Your zigbee issues are due using a small usb dongle with a tiny antenna.
Glad you're not fully switching away from HA, but definitely do what works best for you. I think your isse with the zigbee lights turning on is the same one I had until recently. HA hides a feature called Zigbee groups inside the zigbee coordinator menu, annoying as hell. Fixed my problem though. Just to state it: It is NOT the standard HA groups.
I've had a Hubitat for several years now - Like everything, it has good and bad things. Don't ditch Home Assistant though. Mush them together! Get the best of both worlds. edit: Mount your Hubitat box as high as possible. I *had* mine on a shelf near the floor, around other equipment. Moved it up to about the 6ft level away from other 'things' and 100% of my range and interference issues dissapeared.
Hey Paul, another great video keep up the good work! Couple of points - 1) put home assistant on a vm running on a decent spec laptop, not only is it a lot faster, but you can back it up, I hated when ha would fall over and then you have to go through that labourusly annoying re-creation of the whole ha environment etc 2) get 2 aqara m3 hubs one in the house and one in the ready room - sorted not only is the range excellent on them but they run in high availability mode so if one dies the other takes over, pure genius. ❤
@@paulhibbert If you're running a small low-power homelab server with virtual machines you can run a lot of other smart home functionalities such as a media server, firewall and personal Dropbox-style storage as well as Home Assistant. But the best part of running a homelab server is that you can back-up and experiment on *multiple* instances of Home Assistant. So if you brick one, your main is still perfectly available. Lewis did a review of the iKOOLCORE R2 (idle with no streaming is 13-14 watts, five media streams with transcoding was 29 watts) here: ruclips.net/video/Z7gjnOmRumc/видео.htmlsi=toYmGOnO5sQJCp52
Nearly 4 year Hubitat user here... C5, C7, C8, C8 Pro. I've had them all. And while there's enough about Hubitat that keeps me around, Hubitat has its own set of quirky issues, especially when your device list gets large enough. Add to that the product engineers on the forum who have a difficult time owning bugs and seem to obfuscate issues for the sole purpose of kicking the responsibility can anywhere but in their own yard. I'm glad you're having success with the C8 Pro so far, just want to warn as the power user you are, these gremlins will work their way into your life eventually.
I'm with you on 99% of this video. I had a conbee shtick for a while and it was trash for range and I had usb extension cables and smart plugs in specific places just to extend the range. Instead of hubitat though I opted for a power-over-ethernet zigbee coordinator and zigbee2mqtt. I use Home Assistant as largely just the dashboard. Automation is done in NodeRed. Cloud connections as kept to a minimum. One simple (smart) thing I did for my smart lights that need constant power was to use Shelly relays behind the old light switches. Meets the wife approval factor gold standard and guests dont have to learn the inner workings of a dashboard to switch the toilet light on. The relay is in detached mode and the switch state is monitored from HA to control the smart light. The shelly's also have a script to detect when it cant see Home Assistant to set it to attached mode so in the event HA has a fit I can still turn the lights on/off.
1: NONE of your shticks are getting old. ALL of them are good because you edit well and youre funny. 2: Youre so entertaining and informative that my kid has been liking you for a few years now. Thinks youre hilarious. 3: I made the switch on your suggestion back then been on it ever since, it does have its trials and tribulations BUT i gotta give them credit they are actively working on the codebase and pushing updates all the time. 4: since that video till this day i didnt know we could up the power.....i am doing that now.... 5: you rock and you are my favorite. I love that the haters exist because it gives you something to make funny shit about. 6: Congrats on your new family member!
Been running my smart home system pretty much like that for the last 4 months! All my zigbee and z-wave are on my hubitat (got the C8) and all the rest is on my HA. It's been rock solid and been able to get the best of both systems in my opinion! I even got a govee light that was almost impossible to control in HA thru any of the available integration (at best had on and off...) When with the govee app on my hubitat and now I can control all the different options of that light (and even thru HA). I'm clearly staying in that route and for someone who wants something easy and robust that's is my suggestion for them!
I have been following you for years cause you're humoristic, and do not take thins to seriously. I like that. This last video is in a way very interesting. You are turning away from an open community based plattform to a propriety system based on one single company. Reason: A "better" zigee-experience and support for Alexa routines. 1. First of all: Stop using Home Assistant on a RPI. That's good for beginners, but you are way to experienced. Change to some decent hardware. 2. The zigbee problems you are experiencing could easy be solved. Use some zigbee wall plugs (IKEA, Aqara, whatever) to mesh up your zigbee network. 3. Quit relying on Alexa routines. Place all the logics/automations in HA and keep it simple. This will in fact increase the speed and reliability of your home automation. A hard job, I know. But that's what experience are for, right. And the reason they did not ship that hubitat thing with full radio power as the default setting: Regulations, my friend. Safety regulations. There's a reason Zigbee is a mesh network instead of relying on a single node/base. Keep up the good job and go on, you're the true Bate master! 😀😀
Thanks man, but I don't know why so many people think I've moved away from home assistant, the conclusion of the video is that I'm going to keep using home assistant as the software and hubitat as the hardware
Welcome to Hubitat! I've been using Hubitat for 4 or 5 years. I find creating basic and a little bit more than basic and maybe even a little bit more than basic basic routines. Much easier than Home Assistant, IMHO. I got HA about a year ago and it's usually frustrating to me. Too much cryptic coding and I can't control simple things in a simple way on the dashboard. That being said, completely rebuilding your HA installation to LCARS is awesome and you can't do that with Hubitat. But, on the other hand, creating a straight out of the box dashboard with Hubitat is easier and better looking that HA. There's better control over location of buttons and button colors. Okay, button state colors do require a little bit of CCS but it's easy to get to. The other cool thing about the buttons in Hubitat is the ability to change sizes of individual buttons in an area. For example, if you know you want a 3x10 grid for maybe your phone, make it a 6x20 grid and then you can make half size buttons and full size buttons and in larger than full size buttons. Super easy. (Example image upon request.) I do have old Aquara motion sensors working from community drivers. I haven't tried any of the new Aquara equipment though. The other thing that I haven't attempted to get running in Hubitat, that you didn't mention, are ESP32 devices. I had a couple briefly working on HA, but too fiddly and unreliable. Also, HA is down, again, and Hubitat is still chugging along...
Ive been on a C7 for 3 years and its been fabulous. I boughtt a HA green to see how HA performed. Unfortunately i find HA more complicated and a bit of a mine field. Ive managed to get to grips with HE more easily over the years and i find to he HE forum more helpful and less Teccy, so much so that ive since upgraded to a C8-Pro which is fantastic. I have a 45m garden and it works with no problem across rhis range despite passing through my house external wall. The only criticism ill give HE is that the dashboards are poor in comparison to the functionality and tailorabikity of HA. My ultimate plan is to use HA for its dashboards and to use HE for everything else.
Right there with you. I'm still on the C7 and it'll be its 4th birthday in my house in another few months. ;D Still going strong! I sprung up HA to try and get SimpliSafe running through it when they upgraded things and broke the integration with HE, but the work necessary to get everything just up and running was more than I could dedicate at the time. I am envious of the dashboards that are much easier to customize in HA though HE does have a lot of options available (with a lot of integrations like Maker API and/or CSS coding) to improve the look. If you search Hubitat dashboard CSS, you'll get a big ol' lengthy thread of a lot of examples and coding that people have tossed in. It's a lot of work to make everything "just right" but I figure, it's probably not much more work than getting HA fully sorted, so I taught myself some CSS and made some dashboards that would give some of the ones on HA a run for their money. ;) There's also "The Home Remote" that you can use that integrates through Hubitat using the Maker API, which lets you design dashboards for android, etc. and make them a whole lot prettier. I highly recommend checking it out, as I will be doing shortly, because somehow I completely missed it until I went searching for LCARS dashboards in Hubitat, and voila, one was made back in 2018 and it looks awesome. Basically, HE is great out of the box, but for the folks who say it's limited, they obviously haven't dug deep enough. There are so many ways to go further with it. :)
The integration of HA and Hubitat is great. They're a great pair, not getting rid of either is the way. I'm one of those that uses HA for a UI/Dashboards and some integrations. Where the Hubitat is the primary engine of control in my house. Rule Machine is great and I've been able to accomplish everything I've set out to do.
A happy Hubitat user for two years here (also called Steve). Great video. I also use Home Assistant for the small number of devices that don't play nicely with Hubitat, the easy to install integrations and also dashboards. The integration between the two platforms (and also Hue) work very reliably. Hubitat is a fantastic platform.
@@johnieM19 If your connectivity is fine on the platform you are on then I think integrating them together is the answer to get the benefits across both. The applications are available in the respective app 'stores'. I found installing HACS for the first time a more difficult task than getting it up and running. It's wise to not share everything unnecessarily
My switches and bulbs are all connected via Hue for reliability and also my wife likes their app. It integrates into Hubitat using Coco hue. I have a Hubitat hub that uses the Google Sdm api to connect my cameras and doorbell so I can use human presence for alarms and triggers rather than motion. My Home Assistant has a dashboard setup for tonnes of things, the graphing is excellent due to its simplicity and visually looks good. I have this running on a pc/touch screen in my kitchen
Everyone is dishing Conbee, but my Combee 2 is happily supporting a network of 85 Zigbee devices. A nice mix of routers and end devices. Not a particularly organised network either; organically grown etc. No problems spanning multiple devices in 18 months. Conbee isn’t even in the middle of the house. I am, however, running HA on a decent PC vs some Pi nonsense.
Like you, I've decided to use Hubitat for all my Z-Wave and ZigBee connections, but connect it into Home Assistant for the command/control interface and to connect some odd devices (most importantly my RATDGO which allows me to control my Chamberlain garage door without their ridiculous poster-child-for-corporate-greed system, but also Aqara and Tuya things as you mention.) It's really the best of both worlds. (Cue ST-TNG final episode cut.) My connection experience has been much better than your initial experience. I've only had one issue (noted below.) The ZigBee power option was a great find. I have a "long" layout. I've got the a mailbox in the front and a detached garage in the back. (With a shrubbery and a nice little path going between for a two-level effect :) ) That means that my controller has to connect to some far-flung devices. But the door sensor on the mailbox occasionally dropped off and had to be re-installed. I eventually got a ZigBee repeater that I placed inside the house as near to the mailbox as I could and that solved it. I'm certain that power setting would have solved that too. I just didn't know about it until now. Thanks for finding it. Thanks for a great review (with all the details and tidbits I've come to expect) and some good reasoning for using both Home Assistant and Hubitat (which just so happens to agree with mine).
I agree with your points at the end. At the start of my journey I thought I wanted hubitat because of your videos, but I ended up tinkering with HA because it was free with a spare raspberry pi I had. I just couldn't go back at this point; the flexibility, the customizability, and the option to move your instance to hardware significantly more powerful than a pi means too much to me now.
Yeap. I won't lie. I have had similar issues. I direct connected it to one of my mesh nodes, and now everything has pretty stellar strength. All of my zigbee stuff is working now. Since I put it in a good spot. My zigbee bulbs worked smoothly tho.
From what I've seen so far (and I admit it is only what I've seen on this channel), comparing Home Assistant to Hubitat based on dashboards and automations is like comparing a MacBook Pro to a Commodore 64. If you were new to home automation, I could see you STARTING with Hubitat, but I can't understand why you'd be willing to downgrade based on Zigbee strength. Just get a better coordinator!
The conclusion of the video isn't to jump to only using the commodore64 (which is an overly harsh comparison)... It was to use the commodore64s radios because I am yet to find a zigbee coordinator that can sit on its own WiFi away from all my other equipment and blast zigbee and Zwave with this amount of strength over proper aeriels and properly manage the mesh in a way home assistant never did.
@@paulhibbert What has Home Assistant to do with your ZigBee connectivity issues? Get a better coordinator and layout your devices smartly for an better ZigBee coverage. Sorry, but you are starting to talk BS now.
@@aramtutunciyan I don't think you understood Paul's message. He's using the Hubitat as that better coordinator and integrating it to HA, so Hubitat IS his coordinator now whilst still running HA. I did the same thing, mainly because I started with the Hubitat and already had all my Zigbee and Z-wave devices connected to it, so it was super easy to pull them all into HA by running the HA/Hubitat integration. Best of both worlds.
Hubitat owner here and every day I consider switching over to HA. I have everything I need to get started and then I think about moving devices over and I don’t do it. I’ll give you that the range is insane.
I'm also a Hubitat owner. Still on the C5. I wanted the insane configurability that HA offers as well as some specific integrations that Hubitat didn't offer, so I ran HA in parallel for a bit. Like Paul, I discovered the Hubitat integration for HA so all my devices connected to Hubitat get pulled into HA. You get the best of both worlds. You can have all your Zigbee/Zwave devices connected to your Hubitat, run automations from Hubitat or HA and you get to create your dream dashboard in HA to display/control it all. This is the way.
The Hubitat community can, and probably will, sort Aqara out. They did with Lifx bulbs! My Lifx now run locally and everytime. They regularly go dark on the app but still respond on Hubitat. I have the older C7. But will probably buy a C8 Pro and port all my Smartthings devices over. I have no intention to try HA, I'm not tech wizard and want things to 'just wuuuurk'. Great video mate.
@paulhibbert , they're stunning bulbs but drop offline so much....plus Lifx dumping the EU market. There is one of those community thingys that you install, you know from github. It just wuuuurks. Sorry, had to do it again
I have nearly 100 Zigbee devices in Home Assistant with no issues. I use the SkyConnect and ensure I have a sufficient mesh network of products powered from the mains.
Great video Paul. I too integrate Hubitat into HA in the same way, i.e. use Hubitat as the Z-Wave/Zigbee Controller. But Hubitat is painful, security issues prevent me from transferring some devices (Fibaro switches) from my C4 to C7 and it's a bit of a gamble as to whether Hubitat controls the switches anyway. For example I find Hubitat won't switch a light on, I try again ten minutes later and it works. Maybe the C8 Pro is the answer, particularly if it's a range or processing issue that is causing the problem. The other downwall with Hubitat is that it tends to suport the US market rather than the European one in terms of equipment/drivers. They need to fix some of these older community written drivers and properly integrate them. I can't see myself moving away from HA, it is so much better at linking to the other eco-systems.
Would the alternative solution be a zigbee/matter coordinator like a SMLIGHT SLZB-06M? As after a little research you can have multiple attached to a single Home Assistant instance
Hi Paul, it is a great and enjoyable video as usual, thank you. I hope that you would read my comment and I hope that you would make videos about: 1- Tour of your home setup, after using Hubitat, (also since you have mentioned in a previous video that you will switch fully to aquara devices.) 2- New video in the series "Starting a smart home in 20XX guide" it was a big guide for me (and im sure for several others) to start with smart homes, and I have followed your recommendation in that video. and now with "matter" and with the many options of hubs available such as hubitat, homeassistant, zemismart, .etc. I think that a new video in that series would be life saving. Thanks again.
I came for the HA forum guy and when I got here I learned about the Ethernet to Zigbee adapters. Now I just need to find an Ethernet to Zwave adapter… And congrats on the new family member. Future video idea, integrating home assistant with one of these smart light/sound machine things (Like Hatch Rest).
@@kevinsono One big one for me: Integration with my Harmony hub, and allowing me to set volume, lighting, etc., based on which selection I make on the remote control. And one thing he mentioned in the video that I found is the Hubitat C8 Pro is ROCK SOLID. ALL my automations work without fail. I had failures all the time with HA. They completely disappeared when I switched.
@@rogerosb2u I'll say after using both, automations are easier to construct in HE than HA, but in terms of actual flexibility, HA automations are, to me, unmatched. webcore i found very helpful in the smartthings days and i know it should also exist for HE. the new rule creator will probably make HE even more user friendly because rule machine, while it's robust, is still fairly confusing sometimes when constructing rules.
Honestly, i'm not making this up in the least. I found this to be the easiest hub to set up I've ever used. And yes, it is INCREDIBLY faster than other hubs I've used. It's also far more reliable than other hubs I've used. I have one C7 hub taking the place of three Samsung hubs one a mesh network, and the one older hub works better than the three ever did at any point.
Aww come on Paul - Maybe we need a "Aqara M3 Hub Vs Hubitat C8 Pro" video.... from someone thats starting out and doesnt want to have to do this multiple times!! :) It was only 3 months ago when the Aquara M3 was the box of the month... now it's the Hubitat!! Which one has the bigger danglies!! :D
Good to see you again Paul - I've been away from the world of Smart Home Hijinks for a while. Good to see you still going strong and congratulations on imminent incoming Mini-me.
Echo many other comments. The zigbee issue is all down to the Conbee stick. I had one or two (hue bulbs) devices act up and changed to a Sonoff stick and only then realised how bad the zigbee network had been for a year or two. Since that change, life is far simpler as devices tend to just work reliably 99% of the time. Worth the small investment of cash and then the time in switching out and repairing the devices.
With being able to write your own custom apps and drivers and a fantastic community to help with that it is possible to get Tuya and other items to work. I have a few Tuya LED strips working locally and an Aqara Temperature and Humidity sensor. I strictly use Hubitat and no other hub for the past 4 years or so and love it, started with the C5 and now I have the C8 Pro. Their dashboards though are severely lacking even with their new updated dashboards.
@@paulhibbert I've seen a few issues with interference on dongles like the Conbee with on-board USB 3.0 sockets specifically. Plugging transmitter dongles into a USB extension cable seems to resolve a lot of those.
Oh the zigbee and RUclips rules!!!! @paulhibbert They keep removing my post as I'm guessing I link to the actual IKEA website. I use ZHA and the repeater connects like a normal Zigbee device, but future devices connect to the closest signal. The device is called "TRÅDFRI Signal repeater" With mine I have taken it out of the USB plug and placed it in the bottom of an Amazon Echo Flex.
What You say pretty much hits the nail on the head for Home Assistant. can it be super stable? definitely possible, but because there's so much choice in how you construct your environment, there is no truly bulletproof consensus about what that config should be. it's a tinker platform, but I'd never in a million years recommend it to someone who just wants something that's plug and play. and this is coming from someone who's been on HA for the past few years now coming from Smartthings and having setup multiple Hubitat deployments. Hubitat is definitely my go to for those who want something as close to set it and forget it as possible while still being very robust and versatile. everyone I've setup on it hasn't reached out and complained once lol. I love the flexibility HA offers, but man it's a PITA sometimes from a hardware standpoint because of that flexibility.
Thank Paul, I use both Hubitat and Home Assistant, love rock solid nature and their way of doing automations. Still use home assistant as front end. Personally I switched after various updates for HA’s sky connect bricked my system of there occasions. I still have a newer Sonoff stick, and Aeotec Zwave stick for those devices not supported in Hubitat. (Aeotec ZW111 switch flakey in HE and Aqara wireless switches). Note as a few issues with Hubitat but minor :- Integration into HA transition's don’t seem to be supported for bulbs in HA that are brought into HA via Hubitat. Euro and UK device support could be better and lastly Alexa integration is a bit dated in that not all entities are always seen in Alexa, but fine if same device brought into alexa via HA.
I considered Hubitat and Home Assistant, but went for Home Assistant because it's got a bigger community and is open source. I did, however, go for a Home Assistant Yellow rather than build my own and yes, it's been rock solid the entire time it's been running. Comparing an appliance (Hubitat box) with a DIY solution of Home Assistant isn't really comparing like for like.
I need to try home assistant yellow to make a full comparison I guess. There is another commenter around here somewhere that went from home assistant yellow to hubitat because of issues with zigbee range though. It's such a hard thing to really measure when everyone's Environment is made of different building materials, layouts and levels of electrical and radio interference
Have you tried plugging your stick into your pc to see if you can modify the power? My Zwave stick had a bunch of options not available in HA but saved my changes when I moved it back to my RaspberryPi
You ending is totally correct. Home assistant is not perfect. You can probably get it working perfectly...but its software with a lot of weirdness. Hubitat is not perfect either, as you clearly mention. So using both is not a bad idea. Ignore all the HA purists and find the solution that works best for you ! Again great video ! Signed by: a hardcore HA user.
Thanks dude! I am confident this is the best setup simply because the radios are away from the interference of the pi and are connected to big giant antennae
Before you go too deep, I would love to add Homey Pro to the equation just to know which you think is the best. I know that could be double work, but your opinions are very thorough. Hope you find the best solution for you!
I have to say, there is NO other channel like this one on RUclips (not that I've come across anyway). You make every video a 'happening', like an episode of a series you're addicted to. Thank you for that!
I had some issues with zigbee range with a door sensor but when I put in another bulb with a repeater close to it then it sprang to life. The mesh part of zigbee works really well. You can have issues with some of the cheaper zigbee adaptors with HA as they don't have the capacity to manage a large network. Might be worth trying the sky connect from HA and adding a repeater between the hub and far devices if you are having trouble. Most things that are plugged into the mains have a repeater built in but its worth checking. Check out the mesh graph in the visulisation tab of the ZHA configuration in Home Assistant to see how the mesh is working. I assume you have been down this road before but thought it might be useful for others.
I had nothing but problems with my zigbee network with a tasmota flashed sonoff bridge. I chucked it and got a Tubes ZB PoE zigbee coordinator. I have had no problems in the past 2 years I have run it. I now have 76 zigbee devices on my network and the only reason they drop off is batteries going flat. I am 9 years into home assistant and it is 1000x easier now.
The danger is that Homey have in the past dropped support for products, like, literally stopped them working without apology. I stopped trusting them a long time ago and now they've been sold to LG I have doubts about the future of it all remaining free. They're gonna want to recoup that investment
Great video. I've been using hubitat for a few years and its been great. I've messed with home assistant a little, but dont claim to be an expert on either. Recently joined the two so that I could control my switchbot blind tilt locally. Added them in ha then created a template switch to turn them on(open) or off(closed) in he. Didn't see a way to do this locally in he as they use the api to access switchbot. Next to upgrade from the c8 to the pro.
As a home assistant user... I'm slightly embarrassed that the majority of the commenters on this video have very much lived up to the stereotype 😅 As always great and fun video! 9/10 (needs more filth for 10/10 😂)
My main sticking point with Home Assistant: I still have yet to find a good way to tell it "When I'm holding down this smart button on my smart switch, which has a hold event, I'd like you to slowly ramp up the brightness on my lights until I let go of the switch." this sounds like it'd be easy to do (and in fact can easily by done with Philips Hue, with Hue only bulbs and Hue only ugly remotes), but is in fact enormously hard to figure out.
Been using a hubitat c8 for a year i love the bloody thing, I use it with home assistant but i run my automations on the hubitat and use the dashboard and other integrations through home assistant.
Great video, I however do not recognize your problems. My Sonoff igbee stick is working great and the automations are intuative enough for me. Still a nice video!!
I'm actually heading in the other direction, for exactly the same reason, poor zigbee connections. I've been on a Hubitat Elevation C7 for about 5 years, and I've been running on Home Assistant for the last two, using the excellent Hubitat integration. The main reason for the switch so that it was so that I could include Bluetooth and Wi-Fi devices into my automations as well as the zigbee and Z-Wave devices. However, I have really come to appreciate the home assistant automations over the Hubitat rules. The main reason I am switching to home assistant is the exceptionally poor performance of the Hubitat zigbee radio. I considered upgrading the Hubitat to a C8, but it was much easier to justify to my bride, the $30 expense of a zigbee stick to the almost $200 expense of a C8. Hopefully the c8 pro will work out well for you. Paul.
Glad you liked your hubitat experience (for the most part). If you want a better zigbee experience with home assistant I'd highly recommend changing out the conbee stick for The Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 Dongle Plus. Just make sure you get the model P with the CC6252P chipset. The conbee stick you're currently using has a pretty old chipset that isn't as compatible with newer devices and its antenna is one of those fingernail sized, built onto the pcb things. As you saw with the hubitat device when you're using an underpowered device for your zigbee it just doesn't work. Also feeling a bit called out at 13:55, but I'll say it anyways 🤣I'd definitely swap out the raspberry pi for something else to run home assistant. I'm a big fan of getting a used 1 liter PC off eBay to run home assistant. Costs the same as a raspberry pi but gives you a lot more power without using a lot more power.
@@paulhibbert How full on neck-beard, suspender-snapping geek do you want to go on that? Maybe a bit of shameless plug, but I made a video that is a very hand-holding setup of a Lenovo Thinkpad M715q (there are a lot of models, I got the one Ryzen 5 Pro Processor) that had Proxmox as it's base and then setup VMs to run home assistant and a VM to run docker to run my zigbee and zwave controllers. I'm a big fan of it and encourage others to use it, but I get that not everyone has the same priorities for their smart home and the top thing for you might be "I don't have to spend several hours setting things up", in which case any of these low powered PCs would work fine, just install HAOS to it instead of all the proxmox and VM stuff. The Lenovo M715q did cost me $100, which is in line with a PI 5 after you get all the other stuff you need to use it, but if you don't want all the Virtualization stuff a Dell 5070 might be a nice fit, and it only costs around $45 off eBay (Or at least it did a year ago when I got one)
I started off with the Wink hub - liked it until the subscription model. I then migrated to a Hubitat. Now, am 99% Home Assistant but still have my Hubitat running. I can't remember what it does anymore...but it is controlling something :).
I appreciate the deep dive into the issues as well as the features. The majority of the devices I have are Aqara, and I'd be really unhappy if I got something like this and found out after that it wouldn't work with them.
Hey! Love the content and I watch you for anything automation! Do you know if the C8 Pro now supports Tuya and Aqara? Looking on their Amazon page they show Tuya and Aqara as supported devices and wasn't sure if I was missing something or if they decided to officially support them
Interesting. But does the Hubitat C8 Pro support old AlertMe gear? In the garage I have a large box of old AlertMe Smart Plugs and other AlertMe gadgets that I am hoping to one day resurrect.
The Conbee sticks have never been great from a range/connectivity perspective and are running on an older chipset. The Sonof Dongle-E seems to be pretty stable and has a good external antenna, which can reach the third floor of my house without any issues.
The Hubitat Broadlink integration is old and unsupported and quite frankly, clunky. I used it too. Paul mentions the fact there was some falling out between the original developer of that integration and the Hubitat people. I remember reading posts about it at the time.
Happy Saturday Everyone! I'm now three weeks in, and the Zigbee connection is waaaaay more stable than my Conbee stick. If you're interested in picking up a new Hubitat C8 Pro, then get one here! : BUY THE NEW HUBITAT C8 PRO HERE: hubitat.com/products
***EDIT*** I don't know why this video has ruffled so many feathers 😂
So many people think they have the right answer, none of them know what my walls are made out of, how close my Pi is to my router, how many wireless signals are floating through the air, whether my issue is because I'm using a pi or because I'm using a conbee stick, what zigbee devices make up my mesh, whether I should be using ZHA OR Zigbee2MQTT, no one can agree if I should be using a Sonoff stick or an ethernet based sm something or other... But one thing is for sure, everyone is positive that my working solution is wrong 🤣
Then there are the folks saying I shouldn't be comparing a software solution such as HA to a hardware solution such as Hubitat...I'd be a rubbish RUclipsr if I didn't, people need to know whether to buy a Pi and a zigbee stick or a Hubitat don't they??
Some of the condescension has been amazing too 😅 I don't really understand where you think I didn't take "responsibility to understand my hardware", the conbee stick like any other is pretty much plug and play, and Zigbee is supposed to be a self healing, mesh protocol. What more should I have known? I ought to be able to plug it in and use it. I bought it on the recommendation of HA users that at the time were aggressively yelling at me for not having one because it was "flaw less". 2 years later the same aggressive fan boys are telling me it's garbage 🤷♂️
If you want to make an informed decision as a first time user of home assistant, from what I gather the Raspberry Pi is now considered trash (despite being the recommendation of the official home assistant website), you now need to install it on a NUC, and buy some dedicated ethernet zigbee radio, all of which will be REALLY easy to implement I'm sure 🤣... Or you know, do what I did, and use Home Assistant on a Pi for your main interface and Hubitat for your signals. My way has a lot more options should you decide to switch down the line to one or the other full time.
What you are doing is more remote control than home automation. Just ignore the app. Also for doing rules, do it on a PC... Much easier. Also not the best use of modes. You could do what you do in scenes. Modes would be if it's evening then this is available but if it's day it's not..
What I'm doing day to day is having presence sensors control my lights, but hubitat doesn't support them. I can only conduct a "remote control" style review if I can't find enough things to actually integrate. Hence my moan at the end of the video
tbh your whole issue was the zigbee stick you were using give the SLZB-06M a go It will chang your life
You asked for it. Running HAOS supervised in a VM as a docker image.... like THE method that is NOT advised on all the documentation. Once HACS was actually successful installed it has been perfect since...... but I'm not saying that's how it will work for everybody lol.
I miss Mr socky... Give him more air time 😢
Paul, the problem with your ZigBee range is the Conbee stick. If you got a ZigBee coordinator with an antenna larger than a finger nail then that would work too. Come on.
Totally agree. You pick a smart home server based on the hardware it supports and it's overall capabilities, not based on a third party antenna that you happened to connect to it.
If Hubitat sponsors the video, he has to come up with something to justify it.
I dont care, good for him.
Yep. Conbee stick is the absolute worst Zigbee coordinator ever. underpowered, under featured and unreliable.
True although that's only part of it as plans to control the power are already in the works for home and already there in zigbee/mqttt.
yeah, for the same price he could have gotten a sonoff. Mine works great. He could have also just beefed up this mesh with a couple of well placed zigbee wall sockets
I used to have the same problems with a pi and conbee stick, ended up buying HA yellow and now it’s super stable and Zigbee works amazingly
I will never get rid of HOOOOOME ASSISTANNNNNT!!
If zigbee range is your only issue, why don't you switch out your conbee stick for something better? Best part of HA is choice, and we can make good and bad ones 😅
It's been a long time since I tried Hubitat, thank you for showing how it's coming along though, I'll be sticking with HA too!
He said hardware stability is also an issue (crashes I guess?), whereas he said the hubitat was rock solid.
I've been using Hubitat for about 4-5 years now, and I really love it. That said, I had to stop relying on it as my main automation engine because my C8 (non-Pro) model struggled with all the processing. Now, I use Hubitat primarily for my Z-Wave and Zigbee devices and have integrated it with Home Assistant. This setup lets me decide where I want my automations, depending on what's easier-sometimes I use Home Assistant, and other times Hubitat. It's the best of both worlds!
I've been on Hubitat for years (love the lack of attention I have to give it), but sometimes see something on HA that is interesting. How was the integration process? Do device names transfer? What about rooms? Do you have a dashboard with either?
It is not a homeassistant problem, its a conbee problem, just try the sonoff dongle and use node-red for automation
Clearly it's an HA ecosystem problem, if a very technically adept user such as Hibbert ended up with a poor performing Zigbee stick and struggled with it, and if the fix wasn't obvious, then that's an issue.
@@matthewpoplawski2603 maybe, but if the hardware doesn't work correctly it is not HA s fault. I switched from conbee to sonoff because it has a bigger antenna
@@michaelschmidt850 Agree, it's not the software (HA) fault, but it is a consequence of going with HA.
I waited years for Hubitat to fix the integration I needed and add the others I also needed until I was ready to give up on smart homes altogether in frustration. I've now switched to Home Assistant and am very happy, very few problems, almost everything just works.
It just werrrrrrrrks
@@paulhibbert Damn, I got 'it just werrrrksd' ! Am I THAT guy??
@@futurecactus 🤣 today you are
@@futurecactus 🤣 today you are
@@paulhibbert you have a bad stutter 😂
The best thing I did with regards to Home Assistant is swap out the Raspberry Pi with a mini PC. That increased the reliability massively.
Exactly - the Raspberry Pi was not designed or intended for mission-critical applications like home automation and security. They are great for experimentation and learning, and for non-production uses like entertainment scenes, discretionary lighting routines, and feeding aircraft data to FlightRadar24, but I would never trust a Pi with my garage door, front door lock, HVAC control, or a decent Spousal Approval Factor.
Plus, mini-PCs and NUCs are better able to handle, and expand with, the increasing computing requirements of Home Assistant, such as voice and AI.
I totally approve that ! Home Assistant on a NUC (for example) with a good Zigbee dongle works great.
Changing to a different Zigbee stick, and potentially changing the channel, would probably fix all the issues. You may be running into interfere with your wifi 2.4G as well since zigbee uses the same frequency space.
I'm never going to use a closed ecosystem for home automation. I'm kind of hoping Sonos goes bust and their products all get open sourced.
Might I suggest Snapcast. It's kinda magic for multi room music.
I’ve had Hubitat for years, since the first C4 and then up to the 8 Pro. All the while linking them to HA, but I don’t do any automations on either, I use NodeRed for that. I just prefer to keep the automations away from the systems controlling the hardware. It’s super fast and reliable. The Hubitat forum is the best around, not many jerks to point out the noob in the room. And always very helpful. Brilliant vid Paul!! 👏👏
Oh mate, you had me in stitches over Home Assistant! I love it to bits!
Also, anyone else notice “sexy time makes bulbs pink” at 9:42? 🤣
Good eye 🤣👍
@@paulhibbert
Indeed. ;D Also noticed the read"l"y room at @12:55....but I think that was likely a typo? ;D
Happy Saturday Paul, Home Assistant with an SM light SLZB-06 Zigbee adapter works way better than the conbee or Sonoff.
Got this PoE ZigBee device too... It's rock solid
The frustration zigbee devices that don’t work very well is familiar to me.
But since I bought 4 wall socket plugs my mesh zigbee network is finally perfect. I placed one at my server, one in my bedroom then I placed one downstairs in the living room and one in my kitchen.
The result is two that cover back side of the house at ground floor and upper floor and the same idea at the front side of the house.
Got 100% stable zigbee coverage
Apology NOT accepted, I have two kids and still managed to sort out my smart home hubs….. the kids are in drawers somewhere but at least my lights come on automatically at sunset.
so all drawers need co2 sensors, big job
@@jyvben1520They’ve got robot hoovers in there with them. What more do they want?!
As long as they are branded GAP, then that's OK.
Well said!
I moved from c7 for all the reasons you describe at the end. Understand the cloud reluctance from hubitat but most of the kit (tv,wifi,sat box etc) isn't available with zigbee or local . I switched 75 devices in 2 hours with all automations done. I can now use unfi as geofencing and turn off tv directly with no motion or get ring or blink cameras as outdoor sensors (much easier). Even basic dashboards much better on home assistant. You mention lights coming on together. That is also a hubitat problem when you move from controller. What I'd love HA to do is to be able to have a cluster of zigbee controllers where devices can connect to one zha or z2m especially for concrete houses. That would be a game changer. A poe controller each end of house and maybe in garage to give better coverage as mesh can sometimes have issues.
For Aqara, you can do a basic Aqara implementation using Matter. There’s then a community matter bridge plugin you add. After doing that a basic implementation of all the Aqara devices came in.
Oh that is interesting!! I asked hubitat about this and they said THEY were still writing the drivers so it could find the devices. Surprised to hear the community have written something!!
Does the fp2 work!?
@@paulhibbert There's drivers available for the fp2, but you can't get the zones to function since it's heavily reliant on the Aqara app. I route the fp2 from the Aqara app to Amazon Alexa and use the Alexa integration in Hubitat with a virtual device (switch+motion) & 2 routines in Alexa (why they still haven't allowed for the ability to do 2 functions on a switch yet, I have no idea). I tried through Google Home first, but for some reason it was triggering all zones when 1 zone went off...another thing Google Home did poorly, go figure. With that, I use the built-in Motion and Mode Lighting App.
There's other drivers for Aqara zigbee sensors, buttons, and the like that you can download through Hubitat Package Manager (HPM). They're not perfect due to Aqara using proprietary zigbee hardware, but they work. Search for Aqara. :)
And the sexy cat robot camera hub hooks in to the Hubitat through Matter, so if you have your Aqara ecosystem purely in the Aqara app, you can manage it in the Hubitat that way.
This is awesome, thank you Paul! I have a Hubitat C8 that I was considering tossing because I couldn't really get it to do anything. If it would integrate with Aqara...that would be amazing! Thank your for your videos. Thank you for communicating with these companies about what we are all looking for in our systems. You rock brother! Also, congrats on becoming a dad!
Thanks so much dude! Someone in the comments said that there is a community driver to make aqara stuff work using hubitats matter connectivity, so that could be interesting!
@@paulhibbert I wrote a thing that integrates Aqara stuff with Hubitat, but you're not going to like it. 😅 It uses Zigbee2MQTT to, erm, convert Zigbee to MQTT, which my driver then interprets. You'll find it in the community Hubitat Package Manager if you're interested. Sadly it's the only way I've found to make Aqara devices reliable.
Hey Paul, Firstly... love your videos!
Some people already mentioned it, your problem is not the HA, it's your Conbee stick , plus, and this is really importantant... Make sure your stick is not plugged in into USB 3 port, use USB2 port(!), and one more plus... even more important... you MUST use an USB extension cable, you must NOT plug in your coordinator directly into your Pi. It won't work properly. Do all this and make sure you're using a good zigbee/2.4 wifi channel combo and I can guarantee you that your stuff will be Swift as Taylor
However, if Hubitat works for you, stick with it. To me, it seems like very lite version of HA.
Best
Tee
Great video, thanks for posting!
Of course, this sent me deeper down the rabbit hole on what to do in the new house we’re moving into. I’ve been in my current house for 22 years, and the extent of my home automation is a SmartThings hub and a handful of Z-Wave switches/sensors. For the record, I was into X-10 30+ years ago . Since the light switches in the new place are rocker style, I will be leaving all of my rocker smart switches in this house.
This means, it’s ALL brand new at the new place (woohoo)! My rabbit hole adventures led me to White Series Inovelli switches and I was thinking Home Assistant as the hub (I have several Raspberry Pis for many things currently and figured, what the heck, what’s another one). Then I see this video and the Hubitat option…somebody save me.
The extent of my current automation is just scheduling outdoor lights from dusk to dawn. However, I’d like to kick things up a notch and that’s my thinking to go with Inovelli switches.
My actual question: Is the Hubitat with Inovelle White Series switches a good choice out of the gate in the new house? If so, how long should it take for the Inovelli switches to come back in stock? I am moving in 2 weeks, if it’s too long, what would be a good short term solution?
I started my smart home with Google and quickly figured out I needed more. I picked hubitat c8 and I love it. I have found work arounds for most things that are wifi only via virtual switch's linked to Google home. But I've been wanting aqara stuff for a long time! I look forward to that integration!
Maybe I don't know enough about how ZigBee is intended to work but I thought that the range of the ZigBee dongle is important but ZigBee also works like a mesh so the network can handle growth as long as there are enough devices in the network that can support the mesh
This is true but the more hops to get to a device, the slower the response. the higher power allows it to speak louder and each device can hear it better. so they don't necessarily need t hop through the mesh.
Thanks gents, these are both good points.
This is another complaint I have about home assistants handling of my mesh. A lot of devices were meshed to stuff at the other side of the house. I ended up trying to re-pair them directly to their closest neighbour but it STILL kept going back and meshing to stuff that was miles away. No matter what I did the connection was intermittently poor an d here didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it.
@@paulhibbert HA doesn't handle the meshing, that is done by the Zigbee radio, your Conbee Stick, internally. There is also an important quirk of Zigbee networks you may not be aware Paul:
A lot of Zigbee devices like those from Aqara for example don't re-pair to another signal source. Ever. Unless you do a hard reset and remove them from the network. They will simply try to work with the first connection they made. So if you test a sensor in say your office, and the move it to the living room, that sensor will keep trying to connect to whatever repeater had the best signal in the office instead of finding a better signal elsewhere.
So it's best to bring a sensor to where ever you want it installed before activating and adding it to the network.
I’d highly recommend getting the sonoff zigbee dongle with a small usb extension lead and a good antenna. Your zigbee issues are due using a small usb dongle with a tiny antenna.
Trouble is I've heard people bitching about that dongle too! I am comfortable that a separate system for handling these signals is the way to go
I was also having a LOT of Zigbee issues, checked my power lever and it was 8, changed it to 16. All Zigbee issues resolved!!. Thanks!!
Amazing! ❤️
Glad you're not fully switching away from HA, but definitely do what works best for you. I think your isse with the zigbee lights turning on is the same one I had until recently. HA hides a feature called Zigbee groups inside the zigbee coordinator menu, annoying as hell. Fixed my problem though. Just to state it: It is NOT the standard HA groups.
I've had a Hubitat for several years now - Like everything, it has good and bad things.
Don't ditch Home Assistant though. Mush them together! Get the best of both worlds.
edit: Mount your Hubitat box as high as possible. I *had* mine on a shelf near the floor, around other equipment. Moved it up to about the 6ft level away from other 'things' and 100% of my range and interference issues dissapeared.
Aye, that was the conclusion of the video 😁
@@paulhibbert - Yup! Just reiterating that.
Hey Paul, another great video keep up the good work! Couple of points - 1) put home assistant on a vm running on a decent spec laptop, not only is it a lot faster, but you can back it up, I hated when ha would fall over and then you have to go through that labourusly annoying re-creation of the whole ha environment etc 2) get 2 aqara m3 hubs one in the house and one in the ready room - sorted not only is the range excellent on them but they run in high availability mode so if one dies the other takes over, pure genius. ❤
Good shout dude! I'm gonna look into a mini PC I reckon. Don't fancy running a laptop 24/7
@@paulhibbert If you're running a small low-power homelab server with virtual machines you can run a lot of other smart home functionalities such as a media server, firewall and personal Dropbox-style storage as well as Home Assistant.
But the best part of running a homelab server is that you can back-up and experiment on *multiple* instances of Home Assistant. So if you brick one, your main is still perfectly available.
Lewis did a review of the iKOOLCORE R2 (idle with no streaming is 13-14 watts, five media streams with transcoding was 29 watts) here: ruclips.net/video/Z7gjnOmRumc/видео.htmlsi=toYmGOnO5sQJCp52
@@paulhibbertwhat about the 2 M3 hubs idea?
I didn't realize that Paul from the past were chill like that.
He's playing up to the camera, he's an arse behind the scenes
Nearly 4 year Hubitat user here... C5, C7, C8, C8 Pro. I've had them all. And while there's enough about Hubitat that keeps me around, Hubitat has its own set of quirky issues, especially when your device list gets large enough. Add to that the product engineers on the forum who have a difficult time owning bugs and seem to obfuscate issues for the sole purpose of kicking the responsibility can anywhere but in their own yard. I'm glad you're having success with the C8 Pro so far, just want to warn as the power user you are, these gremlins will work their way into your life eventually.
I'm with you on 99% of this video. I had a conbee shtick for a while and it was trash for range and I had usb extension cables and smart plugs in specific places just to extend the range. Instead of hubitat though I opted for a power-over-ethernet zigbee coordinator and zigbee2mqtt.
I use Home Assistant as largely just the dashboard. Automation is done in NodeRed. Cloud connections as kept to a minimum.
One simple (smart) thing I did for my smart lights that need constant power was to use Shelly relays behind the old light switches. Meets the wife approval factor gold standard and guests dont have to learn the inner workings of a dashboard to switch the toilet light on.
The relay is in detached mode and the switch state is monitored from HA to control the smart light. The shelly's also have a script to detect when it cant see Home Assistant to set it to attached mode so in the event HA has a fit I can still turn the lights on/off.
1: NONE of your shticks are getting old. ALL of them are good because you edit well and youre funny.
2: Youre so entertaining and informative that my kid has been liking you for a few years now. Thinks youre hilarious.
3: I made the switch on your suggestion back then been on it ever since, it does have its trials and tribulations BUT i gotta give them credit they are actively working on the codebase and pushing updates all the time.
4: since that video till this day i didnt know we could up the power.....i am doing that now....
5: you rock and you are my favorite. I love that the haters exist because it gives you something to make funny shit about.
6: Congrats on your new family member!
Thanks so much dude, tell your kid I said hi!! ❤️
Been running my smart home system pretty much like that for the last 4 months! All my zigbee and z-wave are on my hubitat (got the C8) and all the rest is on my HA. It's been rock solid and been able to get the best of both systems in my opinion!
I even got a govee light that was almost impossible to control in HA thru any of the available integration (at best had on and off...)
When with the govee app on my hubitat and now I can control all the different options of that light (and even thru HA).
I'm clearly staying in that route and for someone who wants something easy and robust that's is my suggestion for them!
I have been following you for years cause you're humoristic, and do not take thins to seriously. I like that.
This last video is in a way very interesting. You are turning away from an open community based plattform to a propriety system based on one single company. Reason: A "better" zigee-experience and support for Alexa routines.
1. First of all: Stop using Home Assistant on a RPI. That's good for beginners, but you are way to experienced. Change to some decent hardware.
2. The zigbee problems you are experiencing could easy be solved. Use some zigbee wall plugs (IKEA, Aqara, whatever) to mesh up your zigbee network.
3. Quit relying on Alexa routines. Place all the logics/automations in HA and keep it simple.
This will in fact increase the speed and reliability of your home automation. A hard job, I know. But that's what experience are for, right.
And the reason they did not ship that hubitat thing with full radio power as the default setting: Regulations, my friend. Safety regulations. There's a reason Zigbee is a mesh network instead of relying on a single node/base.
Keep up the good job and go on, you're the true Bate master! 😀😀
Thanks man, but I don't know why so many people think I've moved away from home assistant, the conclusion of the video is that I'm going to keep using home assistant as the software and hubitat as the hardware
Welcome to Hubitat! I've been using Hubitat for 4 or 5 years. I find creating basic and a little bit more than basic and maybe even a little bit more than basic basic routines. Much easier than Home Assistant, IMHO. I got HA about a year ago and it's usually frustrating to me. Too much cryptic coding and I can't control simple things in a simple way on the dashboard. That being said, completely rebuilding your HA installation to LCARS is awesome and you can't do that with Hubitat. But, on the other hand, creating a straight out of the box dashboard with Hubitat is easier and better looking that HA. There's better control over location of buttons and button colors. Okay, button state colors do require a little bit of CCS but it's easy to get to. The other cool thing about the buttons in Hubitat is the ability to change sizes of individual buttons in an area. For example, if you know you want a 3x10 grid for maybe your phone, make it a 6x20 grid and then you can make half size buttons and full size buttons and in larger than full size buttons. Super easy. (Example image upon request.) I do have old Aquara motion sensors working from community drivers. I haven't tried any of the new Aquara equipment though. The other thing that I haven't attempted to get running in Hubitat, that you didn't mention, are ESP32 devices. I had a couple briefly working on HA, but too fiddly and unreliable. Also, HA is down, again, and Hubitat is still chugging along...
Glad you got to the end of the video and actually settled on the solution I was screaming at the TV since about minute 2
🤣
Ive been on a C7 for 3 years and its been fabulous. I boughtt a HA green to see how HA performed. Unfortunately i find HA more complicated and a bit of a mine field. Ive managed to get to grips with HE more easily over the years and i find to he HE forum more helpful and less Teccy, so much so that ive since upgraded to a C8-Pro which is fantastic. I have a 45m garden and it works with no problem across rhis range despite passing through my house external wall. The only criticism ill give HE is that the dashboards are poor in comparison to the functionality and tailorabikity of HA. My ultimate plan is to use HA for its dashboards and to use HE for everything else.
This is the way
Right there with you. I'm still on the C7 and it'll be its 4th birthday in my house in another few months. ;D Still going strong! I sprung up HA to try and get SimpliSafe running through it when they upgraded things and broke the integration with HE, but the work necessary to get everything just up and running was more than I could dedicate at the time. I am envious of the dashboards that are much easier to customize in HA though HE does have a lot of options available (with a lot of integrations like Maker API and/or CSS coding) to improve the look.
If you search Hubitat dashboard CSS, you'll get a big ol' lengthy thread of a lot of examples and coding that people have tossed in. It's a lot of work to make everything "just right" but I figure, it's probably not much more work than getting HA fully sorted, so I taught myself some CSS and made some dashboards that would give some of the ones on HA a run for their money. ;)
There's also "The Home Remote" that you can use that integrates through Hubitat using the Maker API, which lets you design dashboards for android, etc. and make them a whole lot prettier. I highly recommend checking it out, as I will be doing shortly, because somehow I completely missed it until I went searching for LCARS dashboards in Hubitat, and voila, one was made back in 2018 and it looks awesome.
Basically, HE is great out of the box, but for the folks who say it's limited, they obviously haven't dug deep enough. There are so many ways to go further with it. :)
The integration of HA and Hubitat is great. They're a great pair, not getting rid of either is the way. I'm one of those that uses HA for a UI/Dashboards and some integrations. Where the Hubitat is the primary engine of control in my house. Rule Machine is great and I've been able to accomplish everything I've set out to do.
A happy Hubitat user for two years here (also called Steve). Great video. I also use Home Assistant for the small number of devices that don't play nicely with Hubitat, the easy to install integrations and also dashboards. The integration between the two platforms (and also Hue) work very reliably. Hubitat is a fantastic platform.
I've been looking to migrate from hubitat to HA but am wondering can they be integrated together in some way. Do you have an example of your setup?
@@johnieM19 If your connectivity is fine on the platform you are on then I think integrating them together is the answer to get the benefits across both. The applications are available in the respective app 'stores'. I found installing HACS for the first time a more difficult task than getting it up and running. It's wise to not share everything unnecessarily
My switches and bulbs are all connected via Hue for reliability and also my wife likes their app. It integrates into Hubitat using Coco hue. I have a Hubitat hub that uses the Google Sdm api to connect my cameras and doorbell so I can use human presence for alarms and triggers rather than motion. My Home Assistant has a dashboard setup for tonnes of things, the graphing is excellent due to its simplicity and visually looks good. I have this running on a pc/touch screen in my kitchen
@@stevenjones6194 cool. Will the Hue bridge work offline or will it need the internet regardless if either controllers talk with it?
Everyone is dishing Conbee, but my Combee 2 is happily supporting a network of 85 Zigbee devices. A nice mix of routers and end devices. Not a particularly organised network either; organically grown etc. No problems spanning multiple devices in 18 months. Conbee isn’t even in the middle of the house. I am, however, running HA on a decent PC vs some Pi nonsense.
Like you, I've decided to use Hubitat for all my Z-Wave and ZigBee connections, but connect it into Home Assistant for the command/control interface and to connect some odd devices (most importantly my RATDGO which allows me to control my Chamberlain garage door without their ridiculous poster-child-for-corporate-greed system, but also Aqara and Tuya things as you mention.) It's really the best of both worlds. (Cue ST-TNG final episode cut.)
My connection experience has been much better than your initial experience. I've only had one issue (noted below.)
The ZigBee power option was a great find. I have a "long" layout. I've got the a mailbox in the front and a detached garage in the back. (With a shrubbery and a nice little path going between for a two-level effect :) ) That means that my controller has to connect to some far-flung devices. But the door sensor on the mailbox occasionally dropped off and had to be re-installed. I eventually got a ZigBee repeater that I placed inside the house as near to the mailbox as I could and that solved it. I'm certain that power setting would have solved that too. I just didn't know about it until now. Thanks for finding it.
Thanks for a great review (with all the details and tidbits I've come to expect) and some good reasoning for using both Home Assistant and Hubitat (which just so happens to agree with mine).
I agree with your points at the end. At the start of my journey I thought I wanted hubitat because of your videos, but I ended up tinkering with HA because it was free with a spare raspberry pi I had. I just couldn't go back at this point; the flexibility, the customizability, and the option to move your instance to hardware significantly more powerful than a pi means too much to me now.
Yeap. I won't lie. I have had similar issues. I direct connected it to one of my mesh nodes, and now everything has pretty stellar strength. All of my zigbee stuff is working now. Since I put it in a good spot. My zigbee bulbs worked smoothly tho.
Home assistant is rock solid (if you program it wright, I haven’t… but the things I took the time for to do so are)
From what I've seen so far (and I admit it is only what I've seen on this channel), comparing Home Assistant to Hubitat based on dashboards and automations is like comparing a MacBook Pro to a Commodore 64. If you were new to home automation, I could see you STARTING with Hubitat, but I can't understand why you'd be willing to downgrade based on Zigbee strength. Just get a better coordinator!
The conclusion of the video isn't to jump to only using the commodore64 (which is an overly harsh comparison)... It was to use the commodore64s radios because I am yet to find a zigbee coordinator that can sit on its own WiFi away from all my other equipment and blast zigbee and Zwave with this amount of strength over proper aeriels and properly manage the mesh in a way home assistant never did.
@@paulhibbert What has Home Assistant to do with your ZigBee connectivity issues? Get a better coordinator and layout your devices smartly for an better ZigBee coverage. Sorry, but you are starting to talk BS now.
@@aramtutunciyan I don't think you understood Paul's message. He's using the Hubitat as that better coordinator and integrating it to HA, so Hubitat IS his coordinator now whilst still running HA. I did the same thing, mainly because I started with the Hubitat and already had all my Zigbee and Z-wave devices connected to it, so it was super easy to pull them all into HA by running the HA/Hubitat integration. Best of both worlds.
Hubitat owner here and every day I consider switching over to HA. I have everything I need to get started and then I think about moving devices over and I don’t do it.
I’ll give you that the range is insane.
I'm also a Hubitat owner. Still on the C5. I wanted the insane configurability that HA offers as well as some specific integrations that Hubitat didn't offer, so I ran HA in parallel for a bit. Like Paul, I discovered the Hubitat integration for HA so all my devices connected to Hubitat get pulled into HA. You get the best of both worlds. You can have all your Zigbee/Zwave devices connected to your Hubitat, run automations from Hubitat or HA and you get to create your dream dashboard in HA to display/control it all. This is the way.
The Hubitat community can, and probably will, sort Aqara out. They did with Lifx bulbs!
My Lifx now run locally and everytime. They regularly go dark on the app but still respond on Hubitat.
I have the older C7. But will probably buy a C8 Pro and port all my Smartthings devices over. I have no intention to try HA, I'm not tech wizard and want things to 'just wuuuurk'.
Great video mate.
I need to look into this!! I have so many lifx issues
@paulhibbert , they're stunning bulbs but drop offline so much....plus Lifx dumping the EU market.
There is one of those community thingys that you install, you know from github.
It just wuuuurks.
Sorry, had to do it again
I have nearly 100 Zigbee devices in Home Assistant with no issues. I use the SkyConnect and ensure I have a sufficient mesh network of products powered from the mains.
Great video Paul. I too integrate Hubitat into HA in the same way, i.e. use Hubitat as the Z-Wave/Zigbee Controller. But Hubitat is painful, security issues prevent me from transferring some devices (Fibaro switches) from my C4 to C7 and it's a bit of a gamble as to whether Hubitat controls the switches anyway. For example I find Hubitat won't switch a light on, I try again ten minutes later and it works. Maybe the C8 Pro is the answer, particularly if it's a range or processing issue that is causing the problem. The other downwall with Hubitat is that it tends to suport the US market rather than the European one in terms of equipment/drivers. They need to fix some of these older community written drivers and properly integrate them. I can't see myself moving away from HA, it is so much better at linking to the other eco-systems.
All good points my friend
Would the alternative solution be a zigbee/matter coordinator like a SMLIGHT SLZB-06M? As after a little research you can have multiple attached to a single Home Assistant instance
Hi Paul, it is a great and enjoyable video as usual, thank you.
I hope that you would read my comment and I hope that you would make videos about:
1- Tour of your home setup, after using Hubitat, (also since you have mentioned in a previous video that you will switch fully to aquara devices.)
2- New video in the series "Starting a smart home in 20XX guide"
it was a big guide for me (and im sure for several others) to start with smart homes, and I have followed your recommendation in that video.
and now with "matter" and with the many options of hubs available such as hubitat, homeassistant, zemismart, .etc. I think that a new video in that series would be life saving.
Thanks again.
Thanks dude! I shall consider doing a video like that again!
I love the old bits and I love the new bits too. Feels like a new series. Thanks 🙏
I came for the HA forum guy and when I got here I learned about the Ethernet to Zigbee adapters. Now I just need to find an Ethernet to Zwave adapter… And congrats on the new family member. Future video idea, integrating home assistant with one of these smart light/sound machine things (Like Hatch Rest).
I love my Hubitat C8 Pro! It works WAY better than HA ever did, and has better automations!
Better automations? Like what?
@@kevinsono One big one for me: Integration with my Harmony hub, and allowing me to set volume, lighting, etc., based on which selection I make on the remote control. And one thing he mentioned in the video that I found is the Hubitat C8 Pro is ROCK SOLID. ALL my automations work without fail. I had failures all the time with HA. They completely disappeared when I switched.
@@rogerosb2u I'll say after using both, automations are easier to construct in HE than HA, but in terms of actual flexibility, HA automations are, to me, unmatched. webcore i found very helpful in the smartthings days and i know it should also exist for HE. the new rule creator will probably make HE even more user friendly because rule machine, while it's robust, is still fairly confusing sometimes when constructing rules.
You could also use SMLight SLZB-06 as a network coordinator for your HA. But yeah i agree with the Alexa stuff
Honestly, i'm not making this up in the least. I found this to be the easiest hub to set up I've ever used. And yes, it is INCREDIBLY faster than other hubs I've used. It's also far more reliable than other hubs I've used. I have one C7 hub taking the place of three Samsung hubs one a mesh network, and the one older hub works better than the three ever did at any point.
Aww come on Paul - Maybe we need a "Aqara M3 Hub Vs Hubitat C8 Pro" video.... from someone thats starting out and doesnt want to have to do this multiple times!! :)
It was only 3 months ago when the Aquara M3 was the box of the month... now it's the Hubitat!! Which one has the bigger danglies!! :D
Good to see you again Paul - I've been away from the world of Smart Home Hijinks for a while. Good to see you still going strong and congratulations on imminent incoming Mini-me.
Thanks so much man!! ❤️
Echo many other comments. The zigbee issue is all down to the Conbee stick. I had one or two (hue bulbs) devices act up and changed to a Sonoff stick and only then realised how bad the zigbee network had been for a year or two.
Since that change, life is far simpler as devices tend to just work reliably 99% of the time. Worth the small investment of cash and then the time in switching out and repairing the devices.
With being able to write your own custom apps and drivers and a fantastic community to help with that it is possible to get Tuya and other items to work. I have a few Tuya LED strips working locally and an Aqara Temperature and Humidity sensor. I strictly use Hubitat and no other hub for the past 4 years or so and love it, started with the C5 and now I have the C8 Pro. Their dashboards though are severely lacking even with their new updated dashboards.
Thanks for that Paul - my wife pissed herself with the "Steven" gag... because it's always Steven haha
Luv the teleportation, especially at 11:30. Haha 😜. Keep it up, and the funny stuff too.
It's my new favourite thing 😂
About time you gave Hubitat some love! It’s reliable and works great!
Interesting review and I had range issues too with HA, but solved with a simple extender from IKEA.
Now I have perfect coverage and no delays
Curious about how the extender works with HA? What kind of extender?
@@paulhibbert I've seen a few issues with interference on dongles like the Conbee with on-board USB 3.0 sockets specifically. Plugging transmitter dongles into a USB extension cable seems to resolve a lot of those.
Oh the zigbee and RUclips rules!!!!
@paulhibbert
They keep removing my post as I'm guessing I link to the actual IKEA website.
I use ZHA and the repeater connects like a normal Zigbee device, but future devices connect to the closest signal.
The device is called "TRÅDFRI Signal repeater"
With mine I have taken it out of the USB plug and placed it in the bottom of an Amazon Echo Flex.
OK, now replying with no links working either!!
@@paulhibbert I have honestly replied but my responses keep getting removed from RUclips
1:33 His lawyer is just as good as the Homeassistent
What You say pretty much hits the nail on the head for Home Assistant. can it be super stable? definitely possible, but because there's so much choice in how you construct your environment, there is no truly bulletproof consensus about what that config should be. it's a tinker platform, but I'd never in a million years recommend it to someone who just wants something that's plug and play. and this is coming from someone who's been on HA for the past few years now coming from Smartthings and having setup multiple Hubitat deployments. Hubitat is definitely my go to for those who want something as close to set it and forget it as possible while still being very robust and versatile. everyone I've setup on it hasn't reached out and complained once lol. I love the flexibility HA offers, but man it's a PITA sometimes from a hardware standpoint because of that flexibility.
Thank Paul, I use both Hubitat and Home Assistant, love rock solid nature and their way of doing automations. Still use home assistant as front end. Personally I switched after various updates for HA’s sky connect bricked my system of there occasions. I still have a newer Sonoff stick, and Aeotec Zwave stick for those devices not supported in Hubitat. (Aeotec ZW111 switch flakey in HE and Aqara wireless switches). Note as a few issues with Hubitat but minor :- Integration into HA transition's don’t seem to be supported for bulbs in HA that are brought into HA via Hubitat. Euro and UK device support could be better and lastly Alexa integration is a bit dated in that not all entities are always seen in Alexa, but fine if same device brought into alexa via HA.
One more thing as an FYI Hubitat also supports web hooks so you can bring in those Flic buttons
I literally looked at the hubitate yesterday for my new property!
I considered Hubitat and Home Assistant, but went for Home Assistant because it's got a bigger community and is open source. I did, however, go for a Home Assistant Yellow rather than build my own and yes, it's been rock solid the entire time it's been running. Comparing an appliance (Hubitat box) with a DIY solution of Home Assistant isn't really comparing like for like.
I need to try home assistant yellow to make a full comparison I guess. There is another commenter around here somewhere that went from home assistant yellow to hubitat because of issues with zigbee range though.
It's such a hard thing to really measure when everyone's Environment is made of different building materials, layouts and levels of electrical and radio interference
Have you tried plugging your stick into your pc to see if you can modify the power? My Zwave stick had a bunch of options not available in HA but saved my changes when I moved it back to my RaspberryPi
You ending is totally correct. Home assistant is not perfect. You can probably get it working perfectly...but its software with a lot of weirdness.
Hubitat is not perfect either, as you clearly mention. So using both is not a bad idea.
Ignore all the HA purists and find the solution that works best for you !
Again great video !
Signed by: a hardcore HA user.
Thanks dude! I am confident this is the best setup simply because the radios are away from the interference of the pi and are connected to big giant antennae
Before you go too deep, I would love to add Homey Pro to the equation just to know which you think is the best. I know that could be double work, but your opinions are very thorough. Hope you find the best solution for you!
I have to say, there is NO other channel like this one on RUclips (not that I've come across anyway). You make every video a 'happening', like an episode of a series you're addicted to. Thank you for that!
Made my day this comment. Thanks mate ❤️
Ok ill admit you got me with the Steven
I had some issues with zigbee range with a door sensor but when I put in another bulb with a repeater close to it then it sprang to life. The mesh part of zigbee works really well. You can have issues with some of the cheaper zigbee adaptors with HA as they don't have the capacity to manage a large network. Might be worth trying the sky connect from HA and adding a repeater between the hub and far devices if you are having trouble. Most things that are plugged into the mains have a repeater built in but its worth checking. Check out the mesh graph in the visulisation tab of the ZHA configuration in Home Assistant to see how the mesh is working. I assume you have been down this road before but thought it might be useful for others.
I had nothing but problems with my zigbee network with a tasmota flashed sonoff bridge. I chucked it and got a Tubes ZB PoE zigbee coordinator. I have had no problems in the past 2 years I have run it. I now have 76 zigbee devices on my network and the only reason they drop off is batteries going flat. I am 9 years into home assistant and it is 1000x easier now.
You reviewed Homey earlier. There is a new version since that. Looking forward to your opinion.😊
The danger is that Homey have in the past dropped support for products, like, literally stopped them working without apology. I stopped trusting them a long time ago and now they've been sold to LG I have doubts about the future of it all remaining free. They're gonna want to recoup that investment
Mine is rock solid using a Intel NUC...The Rasp Pi is a bit light in the pants to carry allot of devices and automations.
Great video. I've been using hubitat for a few years and its been great. I've messed with home assistant a little, but dont claim to be an expert on either. Recently joined the two so that I could control my switchbot blind tilt locally. Added them in ha then created a template switch to turn them on(open) or off(closed) in he. Didn't see a way to do this locally in he as they use the api to access switchbot. Next to upgrade from the c8 to the pro.
A Stephen here...that was freaky for a sec...not gonna lie lol
As a home assistant user... I'm slightly embarrassed that the majority of the commenters on this video have very much lived up to the stereotype 😅
As always great and fun video! 9/10 (needs more filth for 10/10 😂)
Congrats on the little one
Paul will do anything to avoid making his life simpler.
My main sticking point with Home Assistant: I still have yet to find a good way to tell it "When I'm holding down this smart button on my smart switch, which has a hold event, I'd like you to slowly ramp up the brightness on my lights until I let go of the switch." this sounds like it'd be easy to do (and in fact can easily by done with Philips Hue, with Hue only bulbs and Hue only ugly remotes), but is in fact enormously hard to figure out.
Yep! This sort of thing does my head in, the forums are always filled with gobbledegook answers to this sort of thing too!
@@paulhibbert By any chance can you do something like that with the Hubitat? If so I'd buy one today.
Been using a hubitat c8 for a year i love the bloody thing, I use it with home assistant but i run my automations on the hubitat and use the dashboard and other integrations through home assistant.
Great video, I however do not recognize your problems. My Sonoff igbee stick is working great and the automations are intuative enough for me. Still a nice video!!
I'm actually heading in the other direction, for exactly the same reason, poor zigbee connections. I've been on a Hubitat Elevation C7 for about 5 years, and I've been running on Home Assistant for the last two, using the excellent Hubitat integration. The main reason for the switch so that it was so that I could include Bluetooth and Wi-Fi devices into my automations as well as the zigbee and Z-Wave devices. However, I have really come to appreciate the home assistant automations over the Hubitat rules. The main reason I am switching to home assistant is the exceptionally poor performance of the Hubitat zigbee radio. I considered upgrading the Hubitat to a C8, but it was much easier to justify to my bride, the $30 expense of a zigbee stick to the almost $200 expense of a C8. Hopefully the c8 pro will work out well for you. Paul.
Wondering if you can increase the power on the c7 like I have with the c8 pro? And/or switch channels?
No, there is no power adjustment on the C7 unfortunately.
@@paulhibbert No power adjustment and I tried switching channels several times. The C8 pro probably would fix it but not cheaply
Wonder if they have a trade in scheme
Glad you liked your hubitat experience (for the most part). If you want a better zigbee experience with home assistant I'd highly recommend changing out the conbee stick for The Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 Dongle Plus. Just make sure you get the model P with the CC6252P chipset. The conbee stick you're currently using has a pretty old chipset that isn't as compatible with newer devices and its antenna is one of those fingernail sized, built onto the pcb things. As you saw with the hubitat device when you're using an underpowered device for your zigbee it just doesn't work.
Also feeling a bit called out at 13:55, but I'll say it anyways 🤣I'd definitely swap out the raspberry pi for something else to run home assistant. I'm a big fan of getting a used 1 liter PC off eBay to run home assistant. Costs the same as a raspberry pi but gives you a lot more power without using a lot more power.
I would like to try one of those little PCs!
@@paulhibbert How full on neck-beard, suspender-snapping geek do you want to go on that? Maybe a bit of shameless plug, but I made a video that is a very hand-holding setup of a Lenovo Thinkpad M715q (there are a lot of models, I got the one Ryzen 5 Pro Processor) that had Proxmox as it's base and then setup VMs to run home assistant and a VM to run docker to run my zigbee and zwave controllers. I'm a big fan of it and encourage others to use it, but I get that not everyone has the same priorities for their smart home and the top thing for you might be "I don't have to spend several hours setting things up", in which case any of these low powered PCs would work fine, just install HAOS to it instead of all the proxmox and VM stuff. The Lenovo M715q did cost me $100, which is in line with a PI 5 after you get all the other stuff you need to use it, but if you don't want all the Virtualization stuff a Dell 5070 might be a nice fit, and it only costs around $45 off eBay (Or at least it did a year ago when I got one)
I'll have you know I've been subscribed for ages, it's creepy hearing you call out my name while sitting on the loo 😜🤣
Set it as your ring tone
@@paulhibbert if I do that it would be funny if my phone then went off and you were nearby and heard it 🤣
I started off with the Wink hub - liked it until the subscription model. I then migrated to a Hubitat. Now, am 99% Home Assistant but still have my Hubitat running. I can't remember what it does anymore...but it is controlling something :).
I appreciate the deep dive into the issues as well as the features. The majority of the devices I have are Aqara, and I'd be really unhappy if I got something like this and found out after that it wouldn't work with them.
Another commenter has said that apparently it will work with a community driver and the hubitats matter connection. So that could be interesting.
Hey! Love the content and I watch you for anything automation!
Do you know if the C8 Pro now supports Tuya and Aqara? Looking on their Amazon page they show Tuya and Aqara as supported devices and wasn't sure if I was missing something or if they decided to officially support them
Congrats on the baby mate!
Interesting. But does the Hubitat C8 Pro support old AlertMe gear? In the garage I have a large box of old AlertMe Smart Plugs and other AlertMe gadgets that I am hoping to one day resurrect.
The Conbee sticks have never been great from a range/connectivity perspective and are running on an older chipset. The Sonof Dongle-E seems to be pretty stable and has a good external antenna, which can reach the third floor of my house without any issues.
Thank you Paul.
For my smart home the Aqara M3 Hub was my choice
How do you find using it?
@@andystewart9405it's great. I especially like the way the M3 organise other Aqara hubs, and the way Aqara can automate third party matter products
Sir, does it mean if I have a tuya zigbee smart bulb or any tuya zigbee smart device, It cannot work directly with hubitat?
What is the problem you are having with Broadlink? I'm currently using a Broadlink IR transmitter with Hubitat, no problem.
The Hubitat Broadlink integration is old and unsupported and quite frankly, clunky. I used it too. Paul mentions the fact there was some falling out between the original developer of that integration and the Hubitat people. I remember reading posts about it at the time.
Does it work with alexa without subscription?