Home-Assistant Compatible Hub Needed
Home-Assistant Compatible Hub Needed
My SmartThings Hub is (slowly) starting to error out more and more. I'm doing a soft reset monthly to keep everything up ( I did a hard reset about a year ago when I moved), which works, but I think it's time I start learning a new hub, preferably one not discontinued. My original plan was to put everything in Home Assistant when this time came, but a.) I really like it as my home coordinator with my custom scripts and addons and I don't want to mess with what is working right now and b.) while I'm getting the hang of running zigbee on there, zwave is in progress and thread...not really working most of the time.
So. I need to buy a general all-protocol hub; any recommendations that are fully compatible with Home Assistant? One with custom scripting would be a huge plus; I miss doing that in SmartThings.
I've had great luck running HomeAssistant on an R.Pi with the "HUSBZB-1" USB dongle. Zigbee support is perfect so far. Z-Wave required installation of an additional tool, but also working just fine.
I may ping you on the zigbee stuff. I have the exact same set-up, except that I went with ZWave. I recent came in possession of a few ZigBee devices, and have been unable to get them to work.
I tried, half-heartedly, and gave up because it's not that important, but I have a half dozen of these ZigBee widgets so I should probably figure it out.
In my experience the biggest hurdle to Zigbee devices is figuring out how to get them into pairing mode or proximity when pairing. Most of my headaches have been with it being unclear how to get them into pairing mode (Phillips bulbs are finnicky to pair unless you have a Hue remote, which will reset devices near it by holding the On+Off buttons down near the device you want to reset), or with devices wanting to be paired in close physical proximity to the root coordinator. For the latter, some devices seem to only want to pair if you're within a few meters of the Zigbee base, whereas others are perfectly happy to pair to whatever the nearest coordinator it can talk to. Xiaomi and Samsung devices seemed to be the main offenders for that one.
It's a lot smoother nowadays though, as Zigbee has become a lot more standardized. It's been a while since I had any new Zigbee devices give me trouble setting up.
Are you on Zigbee or Zwave? It's hard to tell from your post. You may have hit the limit of either network being effective for an aging hub, or the distance between telays. The hardware of the hub itself is probably fine as there aren't any moving parts in it.
As far as what to move to, HA is capable of being the "hub". You don't need a separate piece of hardware as the coordinator, just an adapter that talks to whatever devices you have. Get a dongle that speaks whatever you have, and there is an HA add-on for it.
For the future, I'd start thinking about moving over to Matter. It's got the biggest uptake, HA is already working with the devices flawlessly, and the devices themselves can be managed by remote coordinators if that becomes a need for you. I'm not sure what Samsung is committing to for the future as far as Smarthings in general.
Also, if you're moving off the Smarthings hub, I don't think there is a simple migration tool for already existing devices in HA bound to an external hub, but maybe someone else here knows. You'll probably end up having to redo everything piece by piece.
I use zigbee, zwave, and thread. I've migrated half my contact sensors, a few motion and presence, and two rooms of light bulbs to thread, which HA is...questionable on, hence beginning my search.
There is no truly all-in-one Home Assistant device off the shelf, but the HA devs have two reference kits that are mostly ready-to-go: Home Assistant Yellow and Green. There's not a ton of difference between them at a high level, other than that Yellow includes a Zigbee radio onboard while Green does not. You can easily add other radios via USB dongles for Zwave (and/or Zigbee in the case of the Green) as needed. Both the Green and Yellow are supported directly by the Home Assistant devs and have lots of documentation. Home Assistant itself can easily replace SmartThings in terms of functionality, and in fact greatly exceeds it. Most of the headache is just gonna be migrating your stuff from ST to HA and the associated learning curve, which there is unfortunately just not an easy way to do AFAIK other than manually porting everything from ST->HA.
If you want a standalone hub with its own ecosystem most similar to SmartThings that you can later also integrate with Home Assistant, maybe the Xiaomi hub is the best option. However, it's Zigbee only and mostly only works with their devices. You'd be better off just moving everything to Home Assistant up front IMO.
They sell their own hub, I don't think you can get more compatible then that.
It's not reliable on thread/matter.
I have no suggestions for a hub that does what you want. However, Homeassistant does all of what you want and more.
If you have a box that HA can run on, just try it. You can integrate things you would not even expect. You can get the official Zigbee usb dongle from Nabu Casa or from anywhere you choose. Then just start pulling over one device at a time getting comfortable with HA. You can add a Z-Wave dongle, a Thread dongle, and more.
With Home Assistant the best place to start is to just get it running on your network and see all the stuff it finds on its own. Then get a Zigbee dongle and start moving things over as slow as you like. This is by far the best path rather than relying on some other hub that will eventually EOL and leave you hanging again.
Automations in HA are very easy, and coming from HomeKit, they are an absolute dream to work with.
Don't wait to order something to get started with HA, just install it on whatever you have lying around or install it in a VM with VirtualBox if you have nothing else. Get used to it and then plan out how you want to go forward. If you find that you hate HA, it would be nice to know before you drop any $$$ on it.
I've been running Home Assistant for roughly five-six years (Pi, then Blue, now Amber and a second instance on my server for network integrations like nmap and netgear), but since my SmartThings hub was taking care of zigbee/zwave, until now I used HA as a coordinator for every smart device ecosystem I was using (Hue, Wyze, Ring, Blink, Alexa, August, Arlo, et al). Sorry that wasn't clear.
While Ive started slowly adding zigbee devices directly, I haven't started with zwave and thread isn't working for me yet (OTBR is running but nothing sticks). And I really don't want to have my hub fail and all my thread/matter devices useless when I don't have anything that can access them.
z-wave may be easier than expected, as I think the devices stay linked to the hardware dongle used. (This is just from memory, mind!). But if you need to change the dongle, perhaps less fun.
imo, it will be a bit of pain to get everything inside HA, but once it's done, you'll be inside a platform that is pretty open, and commonly used, with lots of other people (hopefully) posting up solutions to problems before you encounter them!
And because it's software that will run on pretty much anything, you have the reassurance that even if something crazy happened, you could just reinstall an old version.If it were me, I'd clear an entire weekend day, power off the old kit, and work away at getting HA controlling everything.
I used to use SmartThings up until the announcement killing off WebCORE. I well fully into Home Assistant using Zigbee and ZWave both. HIGHLY recommend it, though there is work to set it up.
I use quite a bit of NodeRed as well for some of my more complex automations, and use the native HA automations for things like button mappings or simple scripts.