I’ve been playing with home automation for a few years now and wanted to stop relying on 3rd party cloud software for the devices I run at home. I also wanted to stop connecting my IoT devices to my wifi in order to control them. In order to do this, I needed a zigbee or z-wave hub. One of my friends has a hubitat elevation and recommended it it to me so I ordered one to try it out.

First impressions

It’s so small! I was expecting something the size of an Intel Nuc, or maybe a Raspberry Pi, but the hubitat is truly tiny. Setup was easy, just plug in an ethernet cable and power and you’re good to go.

Integration with Home Assistant

There are two ways I’ve found to integrate the hubitat with home assistant, though I haven’t been able to confirm if either works yet. Since I can’t seem to get my one zigbee device to pair with the hubitat, I can’t tell if it’s going to show up in home assistant once it’s paired.

Update: Managed to get MQTT working by using this project. All devices that the hubitat can see are now showing up in home assistant and I can control them from there. I had to get a few more zigbee devices in order to extend the range of my zigbee network. It turns out that putting a zigbee radio into what’s effectively a Faraday cage(a metal electrical gang box) isn’t great for the signal.

MQTT

Ideally, I’d like to go the MQTT route. I already have an MQTT broker running at home and I’d like to leverage that. I found some docs on how to set this up (as it’s not officially supported by the hubitat) and followed them and everything seems to be working. I can’t know for sure until I get a device to pair with the hubitat and see if I can get a message to home assistant.

Update: I got this working, as described above.

Maker API

If the MQTT route doesn’t work, there’s a home assistant integration (a community integration, not an official one) that works with hubitat’s Maker API. I haven’t had a chance to try this yet, but if I can’t get any results with the MQTT setup, I’ll try this next.

Would I buy this again

To early to tell. So far it seems to be working fine, though I haven’t been able to pair it with the one piece of zigbee equipment I own. I’ll update this review when I learn more.

Update:

Yes, it seems to meet my needs.