No wonder I haven’t seen you around for a while 
TBH the C7 generally works very well for me. I tried HA once some years ago but hated having to have to edit the yaml files.
With the changes ST are doing is it not worth giving that another go ?
Since your post here was vaguely mentioned in the HubConnect thread, I think you just did.
I actually was traveling right up until just before thanksgiving. I keep very busy between traveling with my RV and spending time at my cabin.
It does appear that they’ve finally got some of the serious software bugs under control. My home was too large for a single hub. It took 3 plus a server hub to make it work. My investment in HE came before the C-7 I simply cannot justify making that kind of investment again.
[quote=“Shaneb, post:22, topic:627, full:true”]
With the changes ST are doing is it not worth giving that another go ? [/quote]
ST looks like a hot mess right now. I see a mass exodus of long time power users. I think it’s a great platform for someone just getting started in home automation but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone trying to build a serious smart home.
What have I announced here exactly? I’ll I have said is that I’ve switched my home over to Home Assistant. I still have a bad HE deployment in my RV and have said nothing about the future of HubConnect either.
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Good or bad, being a fellow RV’er (coachless ATM) I would love to see what you’ve automated on that front.
When , a couple of years ago, I got my first HE hub I was looking for a long lasting solution.
It seems it is not anymore true, and even more the disillusion (communication style, arrogance , support, customer consideration and cryptic choices) takes me away from investing time going deeper in that technology.
Generally speaking I think home automation is still immature. In case of my absence none in my family would/want be able to repair or even check a fault. That make me wonder if I’ll ever be able to set up a HA solution sufficiently robust and easy to maintain.
Before to turn to proprietary systems (expensive but widely supported) I want try OOL solution.
Hoping not to wait for long time!
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I work with professional systems mostly and I’d just like to address a couple of the common misconceptions everyone seems to have about them
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They are expensive. This can be true or it can be false. It is completely dependent on how large of a system, how many integrations are involved and which system you choose. The main cost difference is paying now or paying over time. A full pro system you pay to have installed and it’s complete. Which is very expensive. Not many people start with home automation with their entire home. It’s done a piece at a time but in the end the system as a whole has costed you thousands of dollars in actual money and thousands of hours of time to try and hack it together and make it work. It comes down to pay now or pay over time in money and time. You know some of us have payment plans to assist with this.
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It’s closed and I can’t administer it. This is somewhat true depending on the system. It’s true with most of them you can’t hack around at them and do whatever you want but you can’t do this with your “hubs” either. You can’t login directly to them and just “do whatever”. Some systems are much more restrictive of what you can and can’t do than others so again the system choice makes a difference here. Another big factor people aren’t aware of is that many of the restrictions are dealer imposed not company. The vendor is not setting these restrictions you hear about but the dealers are. Many times you can work out different agreements with the dealer for access to do things. The reason for these restrictions is to protect your system from YOU and reduce the support calls you make which actually saves YOU money and saves the dealer time which saves them money. It boils down to having a system that actually works versus spending most of your time trying to make a system work.
Lastly if you don’t find a local dealer/programmer you can find a remote one for most systems. Cheaper and often better quality.
I’m also waiting for the new offering to see if and how I can integrate it with pro systems.
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I gave up trying to automate anything in the 5th wheel. The hub would randomly loose network connection from time to time. In fairness to HE, it was probably partly due to the network switch that is installed. For where’ve reason the hubs don’t always recover from a loss of connection.
The C-5 hub worked out okay in that I did use the dashboard to show compartment and cabinet statuses, along with a schedule to run the outside patio lights.
I’ve used a lot of platforms over the years… Iris V1 and V2, SmartThings, OpenHab, Hubitat, and now Home Assistant. Every single one of them required frequent “care and feeding”.
Hubitat by far was the worst. I could go on but I’ll just leave it at 3 dead hubs in less than 2 years, hubs throwing 500 errors, jdbc errors, etc. So bad was it that the DW was happier when the system finally died than she has been in several years. So I left it that way for months until I settled on a replacement.
Then there was Iris V2, the worst home automation platform launch in history, followed a very close second to Hubitat. Then believe it or not, looking back at history, SmartThings required the least amount of effort to keep running. In hindsight the downtime from cloud outages was dwarfed by a order of magnitude by the cumulative downtime I had with my Hubitat hubs.
Point being, you’ll never achieve any sort of ideal level of stability with anything in the consumer space, but with some work and the right platform it’s still possible you to come close.
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As I suck at reading between the lines, would you mind expanding on that?
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No worries… I actually mentioned this in an earlier post but I’ve moved completely over to Home Assistant, with the exception of using one hub for a garage door controller, another connected to Z-Wave energy meters, and the third in my RV.
I’m only a little over 2 months into Home Assistant so it’s too early to give long term feedback, but so far my automated home has not run this smoothly in years.
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Thank you. And now it rings a bell.
FWIW, I have a much younger brainiac friend who’s been doing home automation for about 10 years now. We both started with x10 (me in the 80’s) but he bailed on that several years ago. I continued the struggle until a year ago when I heard about HE with local processing. He was using Vera and HA but I have a greater aversion to ANYTHING cloud so I held out. (You still with me? Good.) He has now transitioned to node-red for all the processing and left just the device interfaces and dashboard on HA. Here’s part of what he wrote a few days ago “… would never be able to debug in a yaml file 
.”
HTH
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I agree. I anticipate that will change.
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Hurry up!
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Would it help with support at all if I sent you a c4 hub I have just sitting here?
I don’t actually have any dashboards setup but smartly just looks awesome and I’d like to help keep it going in case I ever quit being lazy and install some dashboards in home.
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Wouldn’t that be a TOS violation?
To give my hub to someone I like?
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The gesture is much appreciated, however you would more likely be putting your account at risk by doing so, and that would not make me/us feel accomplished. Our work will move forward regardless. This … issue will be forgotten soon enough. Smartly is easy enough to maintain because of the nature of the application. Drivers that are becoming difficult. But, thank you for the offer. Your continued support by posting here is what we really need right now.
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Well it was a thought… hoping to see great things here.
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I haven’t read the TOS in a while but there is a clause in there about selling your hub or giving it away. Besides for it to be useful it would need to be registered to someone… YOU and not anyone here and then someone else using the hub that’s not you would also be a TOS violation. I wouldn’t doubt much these days… I’d advise you to use PM messaging for any of these types of discussions otherwise I’m sure others are watching…
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No need to pm these suggestions. The answer would be the same. There are ways to block hubs. Not only by registration. It’s not worth putting anyone in a situation like that. I’m currently thankful that my hub still works locally behind a firewall.
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