First poster and new user!
As a brief history about the smart home journey for us, I can mention that we currently are running about a hundred devices in our home. These are amongst others light bulbs from IKEA and Philips, power plugs from Neo Coolcam and again IKEA. In wall switches, dimmers and LED-drivers from Shelly, all room sound system from Sonos and Home Minis for announcements. TV-set from LG as well as a Chrome Cast and to top it of a fair bit of sensors from Aqara/Xiaomi. These sensors are everything from the cube, contact, motion, temperature, smoke detectors, vibration and pushbuttons. On the odd side we have a Zigbee sensor for our doorbell from Sage, a smoke detector and a few key fobs from Heiman plus also a couple of Hue Outdoor motions sensors. Finally, front door Danalock and a robot vacuum cleaner, a few services from Tibber with the Watty and some other simpler stuff as the weather.
All of this is currently controlled by Home Assistant, but I’m jumping back and forth between HA and Hubitat Elevation as the production unit. Both of these systems have their own strengths and weaknesses as we all might know. The main goal always is to have the highest level of automation as possible without any interactions which both of these systems can provide. Key here will motion sensors located in strategic places all over our home as triggers. Heck we even have a motion sensor in the litter box for the cat, just to receive a notification when it’s time to clean it.
But just for the fun of it I just recently purchased the Smarthub from FH as they now are available in Sweden. The first impression is that the set-up is easy and the phone app is slick, but where is the presence sensor for the phones within the geofence? There seem to be none despite the fact that I needed to enter the home address, what is that used for if not for the geofence? Today we are relying on our phones presence to wake-up our home and also individual actions depending on who’s arriving, on the opposite side putting the home to sleep when everyone has left.
I read somewhere the Aqara sensors would be possible to include into FH, but there was one caveat though. The firmware on the sensors had to be of a certain version, and naturally the majority of mine were incorrect. Even though I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks like there might be a Ninja-trick within the Playground to include these devices through the Phoscon software with a ConBee-stick. Naturally I’d prefer not to use this alternative, so will be there be any changes down the road to also include these sensors despite not following the standard Zigbee commands?
I briefly skimmed through ThingsPlex. I like it and it has a high future potential, especially the part with the Flows where it releases the true capacity of more complex automations. In a way it reminds me of a light version of Node-Red, which is a good thing. If I refer back to Hubitat Elevation, in this system you can install device drivers created by yourself or someone clever person from the community. Will this possible within ThingsPlex for FH as well and can I hook up devices to the MQTT-broker already today, like for instance my Shelly’s?
In summary, I have no intension to sound negative even if it might be perceived like that for anyone. On the contrary, I think the hub is great even though it still might be a little rough around the edges for my taste. Already now it will definitely knock Samsung SmartThings out of the ballpark, just alone by having all automations running local. That means speed and reliability which we all love, actually I think that the balance between local and cloud execution is spot on. But for now, it will be off-line apart from when I want to play around a bit. With that said, I’ll keep an eye inside this forum from time to time and eagerly wait for the next firmware or app release. This just to follow your progress with a product that I think is having great future. Well Done!!
Regards Calle
