Any future ex-Wink users here?

@Ignorant it will remain as useful as it ever was for holding eggs, but if you want updates on how many eggs you have, best cough up the funds for a couple dozen a month.

@givemeyoursoul I used to have some x-10 gear back in college. I didn’t know they were still a thing, though.

/giphy the more you know

@Willijs3 Can you give a little more info on this solution? I’ve got a couple of Pi’s and I’ve toyed around with HA with them, but… it seemed rather fiddly with much jiggery-pokery involved.

My problem is that I have a home in a remote site without reliable internet and I’d like to have lights on and off, etc… Simple use case but I couldn’t get past all the jargon. (And I’m an IT-guy with 40 years of experience!)

Can you point to a how-to or something that you referenced in your build?

@TrophyHusband I know I’ve seen a good how-to/setup at some point. I’ll try and find it again after work. I mainly just used the documentation they provided.

For anyone who doesn’t know, in most off-the-shelf smart home setups, the device (a light bulb or plug) connects to a hub. The hub isn’t smart. It’s just the gateway to the internet. All the “thinking” is done on a server somewhere offsite. If you have an automation to turn the lights on at dusk, and your internet is down or they are having server issues, the automation may never fire.

Home Assistant solves that by removing the need for an internet connection and doing the thinking on site. You can install the software on almost any operating system and it runs it’s own server in the background. A Raspberry Pi has to be one of the easiest to install it on. There’s a GUI where you can interface with everything in a friendly format, or if you don’t want that, you can work with it all from the command line.

You can install “Integrations” and those act as device handlers for your different entities (bulbs, plugs, switches, sensors). If you stick with wifi connected devices, you can use the Pi’s wifi connection. If you want to get a bit deeper into it, you can purchase a USB stick that will connect to Z-wave or ZigBee devices. Someone even wrote an integration for Wyze. Things can get pretty complicated quickly. I use Z-wave and ZigBee for everything.

I have mine connected to my router and I have a secure connection to my HA that allows me to view my setup remotely. It also sends me an email when my doors/windows open. If my internet goes down, I lose that remote control, but automation will still fire.

I tried to go top level info. I can go deeper if someone wants me to. I hope this didn’t worsen anyone’s confusion.

@TrophyHusband @Willijs3 I was also looking into Home Assistant. Hubitat achieves the same result of processing everything locally. I think the trade-off is time vs money. You can fiddle endlessly with both, but I felt more confident I would get the hubitat up in the short window before Wink quits. Unfortunately I’m not blessed with a large amount of free time, so I went quick.

@djslack @Willijs3 Hadn’t seen Hubitat. Interesting, but pricey. (I’m an FOSS zealot, so $129 is something I have to think about long and hard!)
Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

@Willijs3 Yep – Hass.io was the one I spent the most time with. I see that the user interface has come a LONG way since I messed with it a couple of years ago.

Back then, I recall, one had to pretty much learn a whole new Hass vocabulary to understand the controls and dependencies, and I just didn’t have the time to invest in that for what was essentially a one-off.

Now it’s looking a lot more plug’n’play.

Time to take another run at it.

@TrophyHusband When I decided to make the switch, I had my setup running and all my entities migrated from Smartthings in about two hours. After that, the thing that took the longest was setting up automations. But now there’s a GUI for that and it’s insanely simple.

I decided to manually set up Google Assistant integration instead of paying them for the Nabu Casa thing. That was a bit of a challenge because the documentation is not up to date and extremely confusing (I think they do that in purpose). But once I got it running, I haven’t had any issues with it. My next step will be to move away from a Micro SD card in my Pi and switch to a SSD, but that’s a project for later.

@TrophyHusband @Willijs3 I am a recent Pi hobbyist - last year I built a Kodi box for the entertainment center (legal content only!) and just last weekend I put together a Pi-Hole for my home network. I’m thinking maybe a NAS next. Fun (and reasonably practical) hobby.

@macromeh Have you encountered any issues with any websites? I do a lot of streaming and every once in a while some services will act up if I have an adblocker on. I’ve been considering a PiHole but I don’t want to lose functionality on certain websites.

@Willijs3 So far, so good. I’ve seen no problems streaming from Amazon, NetFlix, YouTube or Sling in the 5 days that the Pi-Hole has been on duty - haven’t tried others yet. A couple of things I have observed: a few sites that used to refuse to load with the AdBlock Chrome extension enabled don’t seem to notice the Pi-Hole. Some links from Google searches that redirect to ad/tracking sites don’t load. My wife likes that she doesn’t see ads while playing a game on her phone.
You can easily whitelist (or blacklist) sites with the Pi-Hole web management interface (but I haven’t tried it yet).

@macromeh I might have to give it a go before this stay at home stuff is over. Sounds it works as advertised.

I went to the app store page just to see if the subscription announcement caused a review bomb and based on the dates it seems like this was already on its last legs. So basically now you’re paying for an app that doesn’t get updated because of tough times.