Smart Home Enthusiasts

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I dipped my toes in pretty hard between 2016 - 2019 with a lot of inspiration from the Wink hub threads here.

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i'm sorry

i am mostly out of it now; got burned out but i really enjoyed the hubitat i had at my older house; it was very very powerful; you could pretty much do anything you could imagine but you did have to get past the initial learning curve.

at our current house, there's just a handful of refugees that made it..mostly the old old GE zigbee lights, my sonos system, wifi garage door opener and hue bulbs and a couple of IKEA zigbee doo-dads. i also have some eufy door locks and set up simple routines in alexa or hue. i don't have any alexa devices anymore but the app is still great from a standpoint of having everything managed in a single place.

Home Assistant is what you are looking for...

Home Assistant changes everything if you are REALLY into home automation. It is the system of record for basically nothing, but the system of action for everything.

I wouldn't say you HAVE to replace your ST Hub. Samsung is a stable company but the Smart Home industry can be fickle. There's always the possibility of Samsung just pulling the plug on everything without warning.

If you are looking at anything else, your 2 main options are Hubitat and Home Assistant. I personally have been running Home Assistant for over 6 years now and it has been rock solid. I don't know much about Hubitat but it appears to be a solid choice as well. HA is open source with an absolutely huge developer and support community. That means faster implementation of new integrations but it also has a bit of a learning curve. Hubitat, while not open source, looks to be very user friendly and is preferred for anyone wanting simple automations.

Some of the more useful automations I've built (with a high wife-approval-factor):

- All family members have geo-location enabled through the HA app.
---- When no one is home, it turns off any lights left on, arms the alarm if it was forgotten, and sets the thermostat into "unoccupied" mode
---- When anyone arrives home, it opens the garage door automatically (this is great for the kids being brough home by anyone else)
- If the garage is opened and the alarm is armed "Away", and if it is after sunset, all the lights turn on so we don't walk into a dark home
- The garage door and lights are on a timer to automatically close/turn off after 10 minutes. A "hold" option is available in the app to keep them open/on if needed.
- Alarm automatically arms "home" in the evening at bedtime
- Morning routines turn all the lights on, turn tv's on, begin playing music in kids rooms to wake them up, and disarm alarm (wireless button on my bedside table to activate)
- Cameras with AI object detection
----- At night, if the front yard camera recognizes a dog or cat, it will turn on the front flood lights (stops pooping pets and ignores people and cars)
----- Again at night, if the front door detects a person, it will turn on the porch lights
----- All cameras alert my phone if a person is detected anywhere other than the front yard if we are not home
- Thermostat (not a "smart" thermostat like a Nest) has better scheduling in HA and automatically switches between Cool and Heat based on inside temp and outside temp
- Washer and Dryer audibly alert our Echo devices when they are finished.
- motion detectors turn on lights on dim at night and turn off on a timer


My next projects are to set up fully local voice control to get rid of my Echos and set up room-by-room presence detection.

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Home Assistant changes everything if you are REALLY into home automation. It is the system of record for basically nothing, but the system of action for everything.

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Interesting. Do I need to purchase any additional hardware to use it or just connect services to it? Is this kind of like what IFTTT was once upon a time ago?

This is where I want to be with my HA setup

Currently in the process of converting all of my switches in my home to smart switches. Wish I would have gone with Zigbee/zwave off of the bat instead of getting TP Link wifi ones. Keeping everything local instead of through cloud apps is most ideal

Thanks for sharing your setup. What type of cameras do you own?

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- Cameras with AI object detection
----- At night, if the front yard camera recognizes a dog or cat, it will turn on the front flood lights (stops pooping pets and ignores people and cars)
----- Again at night, if the front door detects a person, it will turn on the porch lights
----- All cameras alert my phone if a person is detected anywhere other than the front yard if we are not home

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Are the cameras telling HA that they recognize a dog and cat, and HA is doing something based on that or is HA doing the object recognition and action? Did you have to train your cameras to recognize certain objects or is it something pretrained?

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Do I need to purchase any additional hardware

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Yes. HA does have the Home Assistant Green that was developed by the HA team so that is a great place to start if you are just getting into it. Though, it may get to be underpowered as you throw more stuff at it. If you get to the point of needing the extra horsepower, there are plenty of guides on their forums on how to install HA on just about any system and you can find some business-class desktops on ebay for very cheap that will be more than you would every need. Check out Digiblur on YouTube. He has some good videos on recommended hardware if you get to that point.

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Wish I would have gone with Zigbee/zwave

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Zigbee/Z-Wave switches and dimmers are just stupid expensive. Go with the Martin Jerry switches pre-loaded with Tasmota. Do NOT go with a brand like TP-link or other that requires using their servers to control. Go to the Home Assistant Integrations page and find the integration you want to use. Look on the left side for the IoT Class and make sure it is "Local Push". That means it can be controlled 100% locally.

I only use ZB/ZW for sensors and buttons.

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When you say protocol are you referring to something like bluetooth (BT), z-wave, wi-fi and zigbee or something else?

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Yes. There are almost too many standards used in home automation. Matter is supposed to fix that but I don't think it's quite "game ready" yet. As mentioned above, I like wifi for swithches and dimmers and ZB/ZW for sensors and buttons. Wifi is not battery friendly. Every protocol will have its advantages and disadvantages.

You will likely have a mix of a few if not all so, as mentioned, research and plan first then execute.

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What type of cameras do you own?

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I have a bastard of a camera system. I have some Samsung cameras I got for free, Wyze Cams, and Amcrest loaded with Dahua firmware.

I use Frigate which can either be run separately or (in my case) as an add-on within HA. It uses a Google Coral TPU or other CPU/GPU detectors for the object detection so all of the processing is done locally which makes it WAY faster. All of the objects it can detect already have a model that it pulls from so training is not necessary but additional models can be added. Using the built-in add-on within HA allows for very tight integration between them.

I would recommend the cameras be a Phase 2 or even Phase 3 project. Frigate especially is not for the faint of heart.

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When you say protocol are you referring to something like bluetooth (BT), z-wave, wi-fi and zigbee or something else?

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Yep, TN summed up everything really well in his post and his automations are way more advanced then mine. I like Ziggbee for pretty much everything because it is local and seems to be the most solid. Bluetooth is not as controlled so it can take a little more work to connect and WiFi/http typically needs to bounce between the manufactures server so it is not as reliable as a LAN based system.

we moved from what we thought was our forever home and i maxed it out with HA to the point it was ridiculous.

totally took the wind out of my sails when we moved; i left it in good shape for the new owner; even left the hubitat in place and documented all 400+ 'doodads' in a spreadsheet along with descriptions and URLs and changed ownership over to him. there was just way too much i had set up to try & remove it; all those lightswitches and other devices were programmed in a way that it worked for that sprawling ranch (5000sf on a single level) because of the way it had been designed; it had been added onto several times which meant multiple circuits to do things like turn on all the outdoor floodlights so you had to walk the whole house like a night watchman to get to all the switches. the HA made sense and wrangled all that into a single cohesive system.

i even had a spare hue hub (thanks to the guy on here whose name i cant remember) and those epic home depot clearances so i left him a connected hue hub as well.

2 houses later..and hopefully our last and i'm a bit gun shy on going so overboard again.

i will miss the smoke detector going off changing every light in the house to RED and playing a warning klaxon on all the sonos speakers.

the one that the wife really hated was my 'blues clues' "HERES THE MAIL IT NEVER FAILS" when the mailman opened the mailbox blasting all over the house.

and i loved the 'arcade ambience' background music and lighting changes when i walked into the bar where i had the arcade cabinets.


eta i have some zwave room sensors, alarms and open/close sensors still NiB i will give someone on here for just the cost of shipping that i never used.

rick, you get first choice on it. its multiple kits but it is zwave, not zigbee.