After using ST over the last two years and buying the Aeotec v3 hub I’ve gotten to a point where I’ve given up and have pretty much made the decision to move to Home Assistant.
Working (mainly) with ST to date has been:
Two Govee products (lamp and TV back light)
Arlo external camera with smarthub
Dozens of Meross smart lights (WiFi)
4 x Sonoff smart switches
Two Meross lamps (WiFi)
4 x Meross power strips (WiFi)
LG CX TV (WiFi)
Samsung surround sound system (WiFi)
Panasonic UHD Blu-Ray player (WiFi)
8 x Meross smart plugs (WiFi)
Dozens of Aeotec and Samsung SmartThings multi-function and PIR sensors
3 x Aqara single way, no neutral smart wall switches
Samsung SmartThings security camera
2 x Aqara door sensors
New Aqara P2 mmWave presence sensor
10 x IKEA Zigbee lights
2 x SmartThings buttons
But still I’ve had to adopt Google Home to find hacks and workarounds for the lack of Tado integration, and still no viable way to have my super expensive, cloud connected Dyson air filter and fan.
I’ve given up. I’ve battled like crazy to get the Aqara P2 mmWave sensor to even partly work, Tado still doesn’t work properly and the Dyson seems impossible at this point.
I installed HA as a VM to test and play with and whilst the complexity is overwhelming, it does seem that having a HA with a Zigbee / Z-Wave dongle may alll me to have everything in my home working together without needing 6 different hubs and controllers.
There’s the new HA Green Appliance which I’ve preordered.
This is less of a question and more of a mea culpa… Is it just me? Have I missed something?
Anyone in the same boat? Would it make sense to keep the ST hub along with the HA, or should I be aiming for going full HA?
Really interested in others experiences, tips, and advice. Am I making a mistake?
Thanks to everyone in the community. Feel sad to be considering parting ways, but I don’t know what else to do at this point.
The HA <> ST integration is Cloud connected. Which means if you automate something like a Zigbee switch on your st hub from HA it takes the following path…
HA > local Network > Internet > St Cloud > Internet > local network > st Hub > zigbee net > device
And… Because state gets reported it then does:
Device > zigbee net > st hub > local >internet >st Cloud > internet > local > HA.
For ONE switch action.
You already know my answer… If you go HA go all the way. Buy Zigbee and ZWave Coordinator sticks and sever the cord.
Oh and a lot of us are on both or on HA. So you don’t get rid of us that easily…
Years ago, I was VERY hesitant to follow the path to HA.
I kept both platforms working like you said and was doing with HA only the things I couldn’t with ST.
Then I bought a zigbee coordinator and moved automations one by one to HA and removed from ST.
When everything was moved, I safely turned off ST hub.
In the mean time, my mother was very interested in home automation and I gave her my ST hub.
She is very satisfied with it.
So my words are: If you REALLY are missing things that you can’t do with ST, then do it. Move to HA in your time. But if you don’t miss anything or if it is not that important, then keep on ST.
HA will give you some headaches, mainly if you indulge in paranoia of having everything updated all time.
There are a lot of updates all the time.
Wow, that is a very extensive list of devices.
I suspect that maintenance will be non-negligible on any platform.
I was very conservative with my home automation, sticking to Zigbee and Z-Wave.
I mostly stuck to supported devices except for my heating Z-Wave thermostats. These required custom Groovy handlers and I had to write my own Edge drivers for them.
I avoided WiFi completely (even my Samsung TV is attached to ethernet).
Sorry, this information is not much use to you but it may help others building home automation systems.
Indeed. But don’t feel the need to install them. That specific subject is a religious war over on the HA boards… Like smart bulb v. Smart switch or DC sucks v. Marvel
Ok no they don’t they just need to get away from Warner Brothers… But I digress.
BTW speaking of the ‘list’ of all of the devices only 8/9 are maybes for HA but im about 70% sure they will work. Everything else will be cake.
Actually because it’s more powerful for certain tasks (my use case is a port of Bangali’s Rooms Manager code from his old smartapp
Theres some stuff better and some worse than ST.
Its almost impossible for HA to hose you accidentally. Just turn off the updates (i update manually once a month) but when you do update theres usually a Bunch of docs to read and they list all the breaking changes. This one was flat out a bug. The developer was preparing a bunch of docker images to fit into an internal structure change (involved a migration) and the file copy happened out of order (whoops)
Yes this is one of the worst whoops I’ve seen from HA and I’ve been helping people restore thier NR installs all morning but at the end of the day if you have a backup you’re back up and running within hours.
(mine took 90 minutes with a botched first attempt)
Fortunately once we learned what happened and how it happened it was a pretty easy if not cumbersome fix.
Just got my little HA green with SkyConnect dongle and from a hardware perspective it’s rather well made.
Having a little play with it right now and seems to do exactly what it says on the tin.
Just noticed… The SkyConnect dongle is only Zigbee with Thread support coming soon. This raises a question… How can I see if any thing uses any Z-Wave devices with my beloved ST Hub?
Congratulations. I almost bought myself a green it’s an interesting box.
Skyconnect is a multiprotocol capable Silicon Labs Zigbee /Thread radio. If you provision it with the Multiprotocol stack and the matter Addin… It does matter over thread NOW.
That said welcome to the world of fractured on boarding. The credential issue on matter has made this part a mess - but for further details on provisioning matter on Skyconnect on HA the HA forum will be happy to help.
(so I you might be correctly reading between the lines in that while Matter is available Now with skyconnect, I wouldn’t mess with multiprotocol unless you need it.)
Personally I still have my Skyconnect in it’s box next to some random thread matter plug. (note I didn’t say plugged in?) and I have no intention to unless the on boarding gets better. (this is the CSAs issue btw not HA or ST) I have zigbee, ZWave and Bluetooth radios. Use a short USB extension at a minimum or a small USB2 (yes 2, 3 causes interference in the 2.4ghz-3ghz range.)
