I have two buildings on Insteon with two hubs and about 30 devices total.

With Insteon in liquidation who ever hosts their cloud servers has realized they aren’t going to be paid and have pulled the virtual plug.

That means my schedules, mobile app, and integration with Alexa are all dead.

Apparently Home Assistant is a popular alternative that can talk to my hubs, has mobile apps and can get me going (until my hubs die… which is a different problem)

Anyone go this route?  Any thoughts on HA?  What hardware to go with it?

I personally dont use it but a good friend does. It works great for him but connected system updates can be problematic at times and its definetly a tinker situation to get it up and running. Has been very good once up. The nice thing is if you dont want to send any data outside your home you dont need to.

I use Hubitat, but I run it locally, no dependence on any outside servers.

https://hubitat.com/

ETA: They have a very good forum where users share all kinds of info.
https://community.hubitat.com/

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I got burnt when Smartthings bricked their "Smartthings by ADT" hub and proprietary accessories.  Never again.

I have been running Home Assistant [HA] for a year and a half now.  Here is what I think.

I started with it on a raspberry Pi.  I got a zwave dongle to control my standard zwave outlets and switches.  I fired it up, and it found a BUNCH of the devices I have. (Shelly 1, zwave, yale lock, etc).  It did not find others.

So, off I go to the internet to read documentation.  Their documentation is a PITA.  You need to google a lot of the words they use.  They assume you know exactly what they are talking about.  

So, after awhile, I got all the devices and rooms built.  Setting up the automations was fairly simple, with a bunch of other pulldowns that tells me there is a lot more things I can customize.

It took me a few days to integrate alexa, and to turn a fire tablet in to a wall mounted control panel.

It feels good that HA is not going to brick their stuff, and that I am not dependent on the cloud or internet wo make things work. OTOH, there is a steep learning curve, and sometimes the system needs rebooted.

If I was to do it all over again, I wouldve went with hubitat, and spent the $ to replace a few devices that do not work with hubitat.  

Running HA on a Pi for a few years now.  Mostly Philips Hue or Zwave devices.  Two wifi outlets that will be swapped out for Hue compatible units some point here

Using the HA cloud to integrate with Google Home but that isnt a necessity, its something I can live without.  I can use a voice command with google to hit one of the Hue devices and that will trigger a HA automation.

Automations and scenes are easier to set up and trigger on HA than routines on the google or the alexa.  

Can tie my Ecowitt weather station stuff and the Emporia Vue into the dashboards and use as triggers.  Hosts AdGuard Home as an integration.

Once I figure out where Im screwing up my port forwarding Im ditching the HA cloud.  The forwarding worked with the Synology router but not with the TP Link er605.

ETA: What the other guy said about the documentation being a PITA is spot on.  


You can even purchase Home Assistant hub soon,  you may need to supply your own Pi.

Update:


I installed HA on an old MacBook Air running VirtualBox.

Overall it’s been pretty easy.  I haven’t had to tinker with configuration files.  It found my Insteon hub and pulled in the devices.

Mobile App just worked

HomeKit integration was pretty easy though there are a few quirks to get it synced up.  Alexa requires a $65 a year cloud subscription so I’ll wait for now.

Biggest issues with Insteon are that you have to use the ID to configure certain things.   Ended up making a table so I can look up the IDs.   HA only supports a single Insteon Hub which is typical but a limitation for me.

Apparently there is a big update coming this week that will support many more features of Insteon.   If that works out I won’t be missing the Insteon cloud service.