My SmartThings Hub is (slowly) starting to error out more and more. I’m doing a soft reset monthly to keep everything up ( I did a hard reset about a year ago when I moved), which works, but I think it’s time I start learning a new hub, preferably one not discontinued. My original plan was to put everything in Home Assistant when this time came, but a.) I really like it as my home coordinator with my custom scripts and addons and I don’t want to mess with what is working right now and b.) while I’m getting the hang of running zigbee on there, zwave is in progress and thread…not really working most of the time.
So. I need to buy a general all-protocol hub; any recommendations that are fully compatible with Home Assistant? One with custom scripting would be a huge plus; I miss doing that in SmartThings.
I’ve had great luck running HomeAssistant on an R.Pi with the “HUSBZB-1” USB dongle. Zigbee support is perfect so far. Z-Wave required installation of an additional tool, but also working just fine.
I may ping you on the zigbee stuff. I have the exact same set-up, except that I went with ZWave. I recent came in possession of a few ZigBee devices, and have been unable to get them to work.
I tried, half-heartedly, and gave up because it’s not that important, but I have a half dozen of these ZigBee widgets so I should probably figure it out.
In my experience the biggest hurdle to Zigbee devices is figuring out how to get them into pairing mode or proximity when pairing. Most of my headaches have been with it being unclear how to get them into pairing mode (Phillips bulbs are finnicky to pair unless you have a Hue remote, which will reset devices near it by holding the On+Off buttons down near the device you want to reset), or with devices wanting to be paired in close physical proximity to the root coordinator. For the latter, some devices seem to only want to pair if you’re within a few meters of the Zigbee base, whereas others are perfectly happy to pair to whatever the nearest coordinator it can talk to. Xiaomi and Samsung devices seemed to be the main offenders for that one.
It’s a lot smoother nowadays though, as Zigbee has become a lot more standardized. It’s been a while since I had any new Zigbee devices give me trouble setting up.