This is not a complaint thread, just a shout out to webCoRE and it’s greatness.
I’ve been given no choice by SmartThings but to leave. I’m not leaving because it is not stable or anything like that. I’ve had my fair share of problems with ST, but it has been getting more stable. I’m leaving because I have a huge home automation setup, 375+ devices, lost count actually and I have another 60-70 devices sitting in a box in the basement waiting for me. SmartThings works with that many devices, they just don’t let me use them in SmartApps. There is a hard 300 device limit.
I’ve been using Home Assistant for 3 weeks now for just a couple rooms learning how it works and how I can replicate functionality (automations) I had before in Home Assistant. I’m using Node-RED as my automation engine as from what it sounds like that is their equivalent of webCoRE (only in the sense that it is recommended).
Well, it’s no webCoRE. I won’t go into all the differences but there are “basic” things it makes configuring very time consuming. The pro of it is that it is far faster than ST. Almost all of my devices are considered local, including:
- Zigbee
- Z-Wave
- LIFX bulbs
- Wemo
That makes up about 95% of my devices. I’m not sure of my other things are local or not, I doubt…
- Ecobee
- Neato
Anyways, one example of something it makes painful is functionality like “restrictions” in a piston. An automation I can do in webCoRE in a few minutes might take me 10-20 minutes to configure in Node-RED. I realize I have not been using as long as I have been using webCoRE, but I can’t see it getting much better. So far I’ve only focused on what I consider a few simple lighting automations that some newer to ST might consider advanced.
Oh wait, you’d still hit the device limit… scratch that 