Lordy, Lordy all the hubs I have

Devices & Integrations
1

Alright I am looking for some ideas. I love all this home automation stuff, and have purchased several of the different technologies. So far I have nest, Philips hue, smart things, iris, insteon, neurio, ring, and Honeywell( security system). There are devices from each of them I want to use, sometimes just do to affordability, and others because for different reasons.

I don’t mind so much having the different hubs through out the house, but what I would really like is one app that can link all the technologies together. Smartthings does the best so far thanks to all you guys out there writing the code, but it doesn’t quite get it. And sadly I can’t write a lick of code.

I think this would be a great seller especially if it can keep up with new techs that come out and work efficiently.

Thoughts?

2

There are a few options that can put different technologies together, but I don’t know of any that allow for everything.

InControl comes to mind as does Home-Assistant.io, but Home-Assistant will require what are essentially plug-ins to get additional components connected.

Both of those are also, PC based. Not sure on a fully-mobile solution. Eventually maybe

3

Stringify is in beta, it may help some. https://www.stringify.com

3 Likes
4

Thank you guys for the feed back! I will definately look into those.

5

If you’re willing to dip your toe into command line stuff, I’d definitely recommend home-assistant.io. It’s still pretty rough around the edges, but it’s in very active development (as in - tons of new features added just over the last few months), and it’s the best I’ve seen so far for supporting all kinds of devices along with software/services like Plex, IFTTT, Forecast.io weather monitoring and so on.

The main complication with it is that there’s no GUI for configuring your rooms, scenes, triggers, etc. Instead that’s all done through a configuration.yaml text file. For example, to set up Nest with it:

thermostat:
  platform: nest
  username: USERNAME
  password: PASSWORD

The upside is that, with some experimenting, you can basically wire any devices that gives data (thermostats, switches, etc, even some messaging software) to trigger things, and you can make some very cool automatic triggers. For example, from my own experimenting:

  # When somebody gets home, if nobody is home, turn on some of the lights.
  - alias: 'Getting home'
    trigger:
      platform: zone
      entity_id: group.occupants
      zone: zone.home
      event: enter
    condition:
      - platform: state
        entity_id: group.occupants
        state: 'not_home'
    action:
      service: light.turn_on
      entity_id: group.living_room, group.hallway

  # When nobody is home, turn off all the lights.
  - alias: 'Out of the house'
    trigger:
      platform: state
      entity_id: group.occupants
      state: 'not_home'
    action:
      service: light.turn_off
      entity_id: group.all_lights

Note that for best performance, Home Assistant has to run 24/7. It’s very low resources, though, so cheap mini-computers like the Raspberry Pi work fine, as does running it in the background on a media server.