I’m in the process of setting up my first Home Assistant. I’ve been using SharpTools with SmartThings for several years now. Any advice, best practices, personal experiences moving from SmartThings (or any other platform) to Home Assistant and how that went with the integration into SharpTools?
Since my SmartThings hub stopped being able to connect to Zigby devices, and the useless people at Sharp things can’t figure out why, I set up Home Assistant on an old Mac mini, and oh my God, I should have done this years ago.
It works wayyyyy better. All of my automations are pretty much instantaneous now. And I’m finding out that many devices that I had to use IFTT to use with SmartThings connect right to Home Assistant. Therefore, I can cancel my Ifttt account and save a few dollars. It also works way better with Alexa, and is much easier to add Alexa to automations. There is a slight learning curve, but it’s really not that bad. Pretty much anytime I’ve been confused about something, a brief Google search cleared it up.
I am on my third SmartThings hub, each of the previous ones having stopped working. And now the third one is also broken. I should post the text chain from SmartThings support. It’s almost comical. Many times the support agents have said that I should “ask the SmartThings community”. That is SmartThings tech-support saying I should basically “google it”. Lol.
I wish I could get all the time and money back that I wasted on SmartThings.
So if anybody is on the fence about moving to Home Assistant, don’t hesitate. Do it.
I started with Smartthings and even though I had Hubitat and Home Assistant (i think then on a docker in Synology), I didn’t feel pressed to convert until their end of Groovy (much later in transition period as I didn’t have problems right away and was using things like echo speaks). I still use Smartthings v2 for a few things I just haven’t moved over yet and I’ve had it like 10 years with not many issues (until the new drivers rolled out). That settled down after moving most Z-wave/zigbee items to Hubitat (As at the time, many people complained about the avaliable radios for Z protocols added to Homeassistant (and I started in Docker). All three work well with Sharptools all in all. I will say that you could join smartthings to HomeAssistant and unwind/migrate things slowly if you prefer, but you will have to take care to not duplicate devices in Sharptools or in Homeassistant if you are excluding from ST and including those devices straight into HA. Also, you may be mindful and take inventory of your virtual devices or connections to Goog/ Alexa skills from HA and ST, as well those too can duplicate. I do have some duplication out there in a few hubs but I know what I use. I will end that my set up is greatly complicated with Hubitat for many of my devices (which creates another potential love triangle). Lastly, i will say that I do like the Sharptools integration for adding/removing devices, scenes, etc from Hubitat and ST. Home Assistant-Sharptools (I Think) only authorizes from HA app side and is a long list of things with a difficult to discern order (not alphabetical). It can be time consuming to just add one new device (usually use ctrl F) if you have a lot of entities.
One more thing I will add. I use fully kiosk driven dashboards on the wall and there are a few cases where I just use the HomeAssist dashboard for like vacuum maps since that is where it is set up. The dashboard can switch back and forth between ST and HA dashs with links if needed. While HA dashes and ease of use has increased over recent years, I just prefer Sharptools grid format out of box for most of my views/controls.
Like wet blanket, really thought I was doing something by setting up my Smartthings/Smarttools dashboard using fully kiosk tablets. Tried to graduate to Home Assistant Green and got so frustrated, that I put HA back in the box until further notice. I have Konnected security alarm devices/Arlo cameras/Alexa automations/Tapo light switches. Knowing every system is different, is there step-by-step location for HA setup using the items anove? Thanks for any help in advance.
Great feedback, @Fred_Fontaine and @mark_price - thanks!
As far as SmartThings and its reliability - I’ve been really happy. The only real issue I had was when I tried using Ethernet instead of wifi. The list of integrations and linkable services served me well for a long time. I think it will still play a role alongside my Home Assistant (at least for now since HA doesnt come with Zwave or Zigbee radios). So I’m paying attention to @mark_price’s advice to tackle this slowly.
As far as SharpTools and how the HA integration is going… much less complicated than I thought. I just connected HA to SharpTools, selected a few devices to add, and viola, they’re available in the Things dropdown in its own grouping of HA devices. I’m not too worried about duplicate devices. I know many of my devices appear in different places (e.g. SmartThings, HA, Tapo).
@Steve_Butler, I’m brand new to HA so I haven’t tested or learned enough to be giving advice on it. But I will say the HA “Automations” is very similar to other automation builders (GUI’s) I’ve seen, like SharpTools’ rules. And I used AI to help me get started. It can definitely get complex quick if you want, but I’ve found I can ease into it relatively painless. And so far, HA works great with my Tapo camera, switches, and sensors; and also with Fully Kiosk Browser (FKB), SharpTools, and a ton of smart home devices that cant connect to SmartThings, but easily connects to HA.
I am by no means a tech wiz, but I think Konnected uses IP and maybe even ESP32 devices which work on HA (I looked into their stuff since I had older alarm system, but went another way). I generally google “ [my-potential-device] and home assistant” and find integration guidance. Also, I have a few tapo cams working part time, but I can’t recall if I used HA integration (like HACS option which you may have to watch videos to use; or direct TP vendor integration) OR my older tinycam app on Android device I have (acts as NVR). I pass some of my cam streams through to dashboards but not through HA. It is true that HA and fully kiosk have a lot of configuration options, so it can be a learning curve trying to integrate or troubleshoot some things. But hope that helps and motivates you to try your Green version again (even if just for IP devices and migration of scenes / automations).