Wednesday, October 30, 2019

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.



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