My v3 (2018) just arrived and I’m trying to plan the “migration” from my v1 hub.
I’ve got many z-wave devices and several other integrations like SkyBell, EcoBee, Amcrest Cameras, Sonos.
I know the official guidance from Samsung/smartthings on the “migration” (which is not a migration at all, but a complete tear down and start over), is to tear it all out/apart from the app, and exclude each device. I know that applies to zwave devices, but what about all these other non-zwave integrations?
Has anyone tried “migrating”, say the skybell or ecobee, by simply getting it up and running on the new hub first? I haven’t tried yet, but I suspect there wouldn’t be any conflict like there would with zwave devices. Of course there’s no guidance about this officially and I haven’t found anything in the forums specifically either.
My goal is to limit the amount of up front tear down because there are many levels of custom device handlers, scenes that I’d like to have access to in ‘live’ form during the migration. I’ve screenprinted and written down as much as I could but I’m sure I missed something.
I am at about 2 weeks of migration and nearly back to where I was… I have two kids and work full time so take the “2 weeks” accordingly but it is still taking FOREVER!
I have run into an incredible number of issues mostly due to device quirkiness, each one with its own instructions to include, exclude and reset. For the most part I excluded, RESET , and included on the new hub. Leaving both running worked for me but I am guessing it was also the cause of some of my issues - interference from v2 and its network, for example, might have been behind a lot of what caused me grief.
One quick way to tear down something like ecoBee was to find where you can delete the “authorization” for ST to control the devices. I believe that is what I did but I am not certain on exact steps as I did so much all at once. I concur that a total tear down would likely result in less problems for Zwave and zigbee as that way you can quiet down the previous network, and build out the backbone of the two mesh networks moving from hub outwards. That is hard to do if you don’t tear it all down (moving from furthest to closest I am guessing is the safest way to do it) given you would be tearing down the closest devices to the hub first to include them on the new hub… but that leave the furthest devices from the old network without a reliable path to the old hub… so any use or even tear down (yes I had lots of issues excluding stuff too) on the old network might become troublesome.
It is likely that between your two mesh networks the more delicate one is Zigbee. I would tear down all zigbee repeaters (wired devices) and migrate them over to v3 first. Then move over all your battery operated zigbee devices once the backbone is well established. My devices were “Eager” to connect as having lost their near by nodes they were all looking for a new one. A quick reset and they gladsy picked up my new network.
I decided to take my chances and migrate bit by bit. First Z-wave/Zigbee devices and then all the other integrations. I only had about 30 devices total and was mostly done in a few hours. That was just getting the devices onto the new hub. I still had to redo all the custom device handlers and automations.
Even though I took snapshots of all of the pages of the IDE and wrote down most of the details, I did forget to write down the specific settings for each device and when I deleted the device from the original hub, those settings were gone. I could mostly figure out what I wanted again, but it would have been easier to just have it all written down.
Let me share one item that made the job much easier and will generally save anyone with a v1 or v2 hub a lot of extra work. This little box can make your v1 or v2 hub wireless and avoid you having to drag an ethernet cable to all the far flung locations you have Z-wave devices. It made the job of migrating off easier. I wish I had found it when I was still having to deal with my v1 hub and adding devices.
@thedjm - v3 has Wifi baked in but I did not configure it as I prefer not adding another element that could introduce issues. When possible I opt for wired connections for more reliability and to avoid sucking bandwidth from wireless devices, also I can’t get my max ISP speed (1Gbps up/down) via wireless on devices that benefit from it. I have 9 Ethernet switches spread around the house so I opted to relocate the v3 hub closer to my 3 keypad door locks when working on those hooking up to a close by switch. The device you found, though, is of great help to v1 and v2 users. Thank you for sharing!
Many of the issues I had with my grueling migration appear to be connected to the number of devices I have. If you add 10-20 more devices, I believe you might start seeing similar issues. I don’t know that there is a specific number that triggers issues but it felt like the more I added the harder things were (IOW - more issues, slower, etc).
