I have an Aqara FP2 device. About every week (but randomly), it goes offline in ST. The only fix is to remove from ST, reset the device, re-add, and then reconfigure all connected routines.
About 1-2x per week, randomly but all at once in ST: 1) all presence devices are set to away; 2) a set of five moisture sensors go offline; 3) all virtual switches (which trigger or disrupt a myriad of events or flows) are toggled off. The result is household chaos, but the biggest pain point is that the entire home eventually shuts down because it thinks we are gone.
I am beginning to accept the reality that I’m done with SmartThings. I get that #1-2 are small-ish, but they’re like a low-grade fever with no remedy. Combined with Samsung’s effort to disembowel community trust (i.e. #3), the pain of styaing on ST is greater than the pain of migrating to another platform.
I have currently narrowed that choice down to 1) Home Assistant; or 2) Hubitat. Does anyone have a “highly recommended” suggestion of one over the other? Is there a particular consideration that you think is the “deciding factor” for choosing one over the other? In particular @josh based on your experience on the SharpTools backend, is there anything about either of these platforms you would point out (good or bad)?
Does anybody have a “wish I had known” tip for a platform migration of this sort?
I switched to Home Assistant back when ST enforced the new edge driver requirements since it broke most of my devices. I spent 3 years on HA before coming back to ST after finding a lot more edge drivers for my devices. I still have HA running because that’s the only way I can get my weather station into SharpTools and that’s central to running my evaporative cooler. I don’t see myself ever going back to HA. Their updates are far too frequent and frequently untested. It’s amateur hour over there from what I can tell. One core update was pushed that caused all disabled automations and disabled lines in active automations to execute. My house went ballistic with hundreds of devices acting up and I got out of HA as fast as I could. When I complained, I was blamed for causing the problem!!! I have no experience with Hubitat, but I’ll never recommend HA unless it’s a last resort to get a specific capability you can’t get otherwise.
I was heavily invested in Webcore automations when I was using Smartthings. When that capability was to be removed from ST, it was a no-brainer for me to migrate all of my devices and Webcore pistons to Hubitat. Everything has continued to work great, and I haven’t looked back.
Thanks @Donald_McKee. After a few days of research and consideration, I purchased a Hubitat. It arrived yesterday, and I got it up and running last night. I’ll begin mapping out the migration tonight - the goal is to be 100% ST free by the end of next week.
I purchased my first ST hub in July 2015, and my entire home automation environment is built around it. I’m disappointed by the need for change, but after initial setup and poking around a bit, Hubitat is looking very promising. I’ll follow up here when the migration is complete.
I share the sentiments, I dropped SmThings some time ago, and never should have spent money on their stuff.
For me, when a device manufacturer insists their hub is mandatory and processing takes place on their servers, wellllll…. I choose to go another way.
On the back-end I went for Homey SHS because of its simplicity with advanced flows, the whole system is running in a docker on my nas. If the internet is down, I’m still good to go. For devices I am slowly standardising on Shelly devices, swapping out older controllers as they pass on. In most cases I don’t pair the devices with Homey, just read them in an advanced flow using the IP number and a GET call, then parsing the json response. Or receive trigger events from an action triggered and executed on the device. Shelly is multi comms capable and no hub required, most offer script capability, wherein you can access all of the device, send webhooks, etc.. Last week I setup a BLE scanner reading the signals broadcasted by the CO2 sensors in the house. Because I am also lazy claud ai did the coding, I did the copy and paste and some minor debugging. The Pro 1 Switch is still doing what it was installed for, switching a local light circuit. And on the side, it doubles up as a BLE scanner/reader. I also wish I had known that to be possible a while ago.
I’ve been running a SmartThings hub for 11 years, 1 month and 16 days.
My entire home automation environment was built on it - well over a hundred devices, and nearly a hundred rules in ST, SharpTools, VoiceMonkey and custom scripts (and webCoRE before that). Having completed a full migration to Hubitat, I just unplugged my SmartThings hub. It’s too early to judge with any certainty, but at this point I guess Samsung’s decision to charge for API access really has resulted in a “new, enhanced experience” in my case.
While I’m disappointed by this decsion, ST has been a great smart home platform and I’m grateful for that. So long, SmartThings!