redundant system hc3 with home assistant

[edwink023 1]

i have an hc3 for a few months and its very stable but was missing some intergrations so start looking in home assistant.

With home assistant I found al the functions I want and mores I was thinking if I use home assistant as my main platform and hc3 as a z-wave and hopefully soon a Zigbee gateway.

is it possible to use the hc3 as a redundent secondary system that works besides home assistant, making the most important automations on both systems so when home assistant fails the hc3 will take it over.

Is there a good way to implement this, so that it takes over automatic or do I have to activate is manually on the hc3.

iam really curious if somebody has something setup like this.

[rliessum 6]

On 3/7/2022 at 8:55 AM, cag014 said:

Just out of curiosity, what exactly you do with HA that couldn't be done with HC3?
In the future HC3 will support Zigbee also...

 

I recently switched from Home Assistant on an Odroid with Z-Wave/Zigbee and a Hue hub to Home Center 3, and it was painfully difficult to get things set up as they were before.

I had to write a lot of LUA (both QuickApps and scenes) to get it on pair, and it isn't.

I do appreciate the following aspects of HC3:

• Fibaro hardware is the best on the market, no question about that. I have a lot of it and am invested in keeping and buying it
• The HC3 is a beautiful and capable piece of hardware
• Fibaro Z-Wave controller is the best in market
• Firmware upgrade support

The direction of HC3 software is good (looking at the latest beta), but it can't compare to the ongoing community support that Home Assistant has. It has a lot of momentum.

To improve the quality of HC3, I suggest:

Looking at Home Assistant:

• More higher quality integrations (official integrations adopted by Nabu Case/HA or HACS/community that is more loose)
• Auto discover feature is really nice
• Better web interface (the material design has to fit you but you can modify it)
• A decent app, The Yubii app is not cutting it for me, sorry
• Innovation from Nabu Case (Matter/remote/ESPhome/Z-wave JS (debatable)/remote access solution) that is supporting Open Source

 

[edwink023 1]

nobody?

[cag014 632]

Just out of curiosity, what exactly you do with HA that couldn't be done with HC3?
In the future HC3 will support Zigbee also...

[petergebruers 1,265]

1 hour ago, edwink023 said:

nobody?

What is your actual problem, concern, deep "angst" or uncertainty? Your question is intriguing but might hide a real and more concerning issue...

 

You see... I have been doing HCx and HASS and OpenZWave and Domoticz and occasionally Openhab en I never felt those systems were unreliable, let alone that I would want to build a complex failover system between dissimilar platforms.

 

You say "is it possible to use the hc3 as a redundent secondary system that works besides home assistant, making the most important automations on both systems so when home assistant fails the hc3 will take it over." and the short answer could be "no, because the concept of failover does not exist in hass and neither does it exist in HC world".

 

I got a feeling, I do understand your quest(ion)... Is it along this line: "I find home automation super important, so I fear it does not meet my expectations when it comes to reliability".

 

Maybe, I have been very good at avoiding your question altogether:

• instead of having a temperature sensor and a relay, I use a thermostat. That way, temperature will never get out of control
• instead of using a scene to time something super critical (eg run time of an ozone generator) I use a smart relay, which can autonomously time the on-period

 

BTW I have worked mostly in IT and "redundant" systems exists, but I have seen more than 50% of all implementations do something unexpected which kind of defeated their purpose... It is hard to get it right IMHO.

 

Tell me more, I am intrigued!

[edwink023 1]

hello guys,

 

A bit late with the response but i'am tinkering a lot with home assistant.

 

It's not that i'am afraid that my system will fail and that i cannot control anything, at the moment i only have my light on it and trying to make it work how i want.

i try to configure it so that there will be no direct input from me.

so its a bit like a aset and forget idea.

 

I Bought the hc3 with idea in mind that it will support most protocalls(zwave,zigbee,bleutooth) to be flexibel with supported hardware.

 

As iam a beginner is found it hard to understand lua coding and i stumbled across eventrunner that was a lot easier to implement, but the only thing i could not do was control my lights when  using plex.

My attention went to home assistant as the all "powerfull" to do everything, hc3 could do it also but the learning curve a a bit steep.

After some thinkering and a bit off patiance and some help from the community i got home assistant controle everything i want even the media side.

At the moment i have connected my roborock to HA and now trying to make a morning routine that tells me the weather off that day and my appointment that are coming op.

Then the next thing will be to put my heating system and make some sort of alarm system.

 

So now i have a expensive controller that i don't want to discard because its hc3 is a great machine and i use it now as an gateway between my sensors and home assistant.

So i was thinking if there was a way to make a redundant system just maybe as a later project

[panis 1]

Hi this is my Plex quickapp, to read state of movie playing from server to control ligths:

Please login or register to see this link.

[petergebruers 1,265]

@edwink023 Thank you for reporting back. That is an interesting plot twist: you ask about redundancy, then move from HC3 to Home Assistant. HC3 + HASS is an interesting "mix", I have that kind of setup, so I know

[edwink023 1]

@panis thank i will take a look at your quickapp and give it a wirl.

 

@petergebruers haha well iam nog going to discard the hc3 , iam still planning to make al the automations that iam making on HA on the hc3.

The idea for redundancy is more like we humans adept quite quick and found out the iam already used to al the motion sensors and data and al the things that happen automatic without thinking about it (iam lazy in that way  ).

so its not out of necessity but out of convenience, but as you point out its quite hard to make it work well.  

 

Currently i run HA as Core in Python on my mac mini m1 that Is quite energy efficient  but the downside is that i have 2 units running to run both systems, jus to see witch system i like better and is easier to understand for me.

 

For now HA is easier to setup, i had problems with plex (gonna try the QA of Panis) and could not control my avr reciever + tv, and this is already working flawless on HA.

Sinds i use a lot of apple product i like to use homekit, before i used HA i had home bridge running+ HC3,sinds HA has homebridge natively intergraded so to try out HA was a no brainer ( sinds HC3 iam hooked on home automation  and HA made it worse)

 

I really like how stable the HC3 platform is and in combination with the quickapp eventrunner4 from jgab is was relative ok to setup something as a total newbie.

 

Last week i mode a bed sensor using strain sensors and fibaro implant and HA to trigger some automation when i go to bed and when i get out of bed and depending how many people are in bed.

At the moment i try to get my calander in HA so i can make an morning announcement on my homepod mini with the weather that day and upcoming appointments.

And at the moment i use adaptive lighting that controles the light depending on the sun that i really like.

 

These are few examples that i use in HA and no doubt HC3 can do all of this but i think it will be a bit harder to do all this, but when Fibrao implement 

zigbee and all of the above is "easy" to setup in HC3 maybe i will be conferred back, in mean time i have a lot to learn about Hc3 and HA so i will not get bored in a long long time.

[Corceiro 3]

On 3/7/2022 at 7:55 AM, cag014 said:

Just out of curiosity, what exactly you do with HA that couldn't be done with HC3?
In the future HC3 will support Zigbee also...

For instance, connection with JLR Incontrol servers to get the SoC of my EV and control the Wallbox to charge it.

[okidoki 15]

just to add:

I have a full working HC3 with >50 devices, mostly dimmers and switches. I also installed a HA server, first on a VM to play on my macbook. There is a fibarao integration for HA that simply reads al the info from fibaro and all your sensors and switches are available in HA.

Indeed, the HC3 is very stable, i will keep it. I also have a lot of lua code for alarms and scripts. Integration with google voice control is great. 

But the Gui of fibaro just is so user unfriendly and ugly. SO i use HA for playing with the GUI, have acces via a beautiful customizeable web page on computer or mobile. 

Also, i have a lot of integration for hardware that were automatically found by HA, like my vacumer, the tv, the sonos, the solor panels etc. No code needed. 

So the combination is very fun.