Hubitat Migration Complete! Long Live Hubitat!

It took the better part of two days and excluding and including more times than I can count, but I've successfully* moved over all of my 70 devices to Hubitat.  Yep, that's an asterisk next to successfully, because in the process I seem to have lost two Zigbee devices and my water sensors don't appear to be supported (and no driver to be found).  The remaining devices were relatively easy to move despite my slow start... see previous post.

The two devices that I was surprised were supported were my ZRTSI Interface for my motorized blinds, made by Somfy and my Hampton Bay Universal Ceiling Fan Control (that uses Z-Wave).

The ZRTSI was a bit of a challenge to get unregistered from Wink, but I was able to successfully exclude all of virtual nodes and the base node and included them on Hubitat.  The VNODES show up as Generic Z-Wave Shades, but I can use them as a switch.  So On == Open and Off == Close.  As others have noted, there's no "My" setting which would allow you to stop the blinds somewhere between open and closed. As a bonus though I don't have to go through IFTTT to open and close the blinds using a Robot trigger on Wink.  I can just call it from Hubitat or issue a "Turn on Blinds" to Alexa to open them up.  

The Fan Control device was enabled using the "King of Fans" driver on Hubitat.  I can address each of the functions directly and again I can call it directly from Alexa. Before this also required IFTTT and the trigger command through Alexa to set the fan to a particular speed since Wink was unable to directly address non-switches/buttons through Alexa.  

The devices that didn't work were a couple of CREE Zigbee Bulbs that I can't get to factory reset.  When removing my other bulbs from Wink they would blink indicating they had been reset and I could discover them again on Hubitat.  I have two though that won't reset no matter how many times I go through the 2-sec on 2-sec off x 4 process.  And my water senosrs are the Aeotec ones that worked with Wink, and are discovered by Hubitat, but will only report the battery remaining and not the presence of water even if I change the device type.  **I found another procedure for CREE that was 1 sec on, 2 sec off x 4 that worked!

All in all, I'm happy with the new platform and the new flexibility it provides.  Now that the same functionality I had before is migrated, I'm going to start investigating the new features that I have available now since Hubitat is significantly more flexible and programmable than was available with Wink.

Thanks Wink for providing the platform which really got me into home automation.  I don't think they'll survive the year, but here's hoping I'm wrong.

Re-homing GE/Jasco Z-Wave Switches and Dimmers

The move to a new hub has not started as smoothly as I would have liked.  I'd thought (mistakingly) that a big company like GE would have its stuff together and the process of unregistering and reregistering their device would be easy and straightforward.  If you're scouring the web looking for a reset procedure for the GE 127221 or 12724, here's what I did, though you may want to omit several of these steps:


1. Unregister the "light" from Wink by clicking "Remove this Light" from the edit menu in the Lights panel.
2 Use the "factory reset" procedure I found while also scouring the web.  Pull the air-gap tab, replace the air-gap tab, and press up ten times on the toggle.  Try the other reset procedure I found (toggle up three times followed by down three times) just for good measure.
3. Attempt to discover the "new" switch on Hubitat using Z-Wave Inclusion Mode and toggling the light on.
4. Congratulate yourself after the Hubitat shows the following and assuming the switch will soon be usable on the new platform.

5. Wait an excruciatingly long time for it to initialize.

5. Try exclusion / inclusion several more times only to reenter the "Initializing" loop.

6. Switch browsers. Rediscover.  Keep waiting.

7. Read forum posts and keep waiting.

8. Contact Jasco customer service and discover that community support is only available for Hubitat.

9. Learn there is no way to factory reset the Jasco 127221 and 127224 switches and that general exclusion is the only way to have it forget its previous associations.  Really?  So you can safely skip step 2 if you're still following my procedure... sorry.

10. Upgrade Hubitat from 2.6.112 to 2.6.113

11. Repeat Step 3

I don't know if it was the software update, several reboots, repairing Z-Wave on the hub or Saturn's alignment with Ceres, but after that steps 1 and 3 seem to be working for all of my switches.

Winking out and moving to Hubitat

After two years, it looks like it's time to update the ol' blog again.  This time is more a necessity than a general want to.  It appears that Wink is on life support and will probably close its doors (and its cloud) very shortly.  The writing has been on the wall for a while now with product unavailability and outages over the past 6 months, but the thing just works and since I use voice commands for nearly everything, I haven't had to really deal with the archaic, clunky interface on the mobile device.

So it's au revoir to the Wink Hub and a move to a new platform.  We had a good run, but I don't want to have to turn on and off my lights with my hand... like a savage.  Who does that?

I'm not thrilled with any of the alternatives, really, but I've narrowed my future platform to either Hubitat or Home Assistant.  I've purchased the Hubitat from Amazon and I stood up a basic Ubuntu server with docker to run Home Assistant.  I'll probably be using both of them for a while until I figure out which way I'm going to go.  If you have experience with both and have an opinion, please leave a comment below.

Here's how I see each of them:

For reference, I'm using mostly GE/Jasco ZWave switches, CREE Zigbee bulbs, Schlage Zwave locks, Dome Door/Window Contact Sensors (and some Trippers still), Aeotech Zwave water sensors, Honeywell Thermostats, Nest Protect, and a bunch of Somfy motorized blinds with the Zwave to RTS gateway.

Now that I have a general strategy on where I'm going the next the next few posts are going to be the process of moving from one platform to another hopefully with limited disruption.

Next up, deregistering the GE/Jasco switches since I have a ton of those and adding them to Hubitat.