🔌 Elevate Your Home, Elevate Your Life!
The Hubitat Elevation Home Automation Hub (Model C-7) is a powerful, compact device that enables seamless local processing for fast and reliable home automation. Compatible with a wide range of devices including Zigbee, Z-Wave, and major voice assistants, it offers customizable automation options without relying on cloud servers, ensuring your smart home operates smoothly and securely.
Manufacturer | Hubitat |
Part Number | HC5 |
Item Weight | 8.1 ounces |
Product Dimensions | 2.95 x 2.95 x 0.67 inches |
Item model number | HC5 |
Is Discontinued By Manufacturer | No |
Color | Black |
Voltage | 120 Volts |
Item Package Quantity | 1 |
Special Features | WPS |
Batteries Included? | No |
Batteries Required? | No |
R**.
Finally impressed, just a little (UPDATED 2/25)
Good: Reasonably easy to set up. Reaches everywhere in my house without meshed devices.Bad: Very erratic operation. I have a very simple setup at present: one Z-wave-plus dimmer controlled by one Zigbee button via the "simple automation rules" app. Worked perfectly for the first week, then degraded to where it currently works correctly about one in five attempts, and that only after up to a five-second delay. Log is recording every button press and every successful control attempt, and the lights respond instantly to commands via the web interface, so I conclude it's a software issue. No diagnostics routines that I can find other than logs. Hub also takes an unreasonably long time to reboot.Ugly: Not nearly as customizable as the ads make it out to be. I had hopes of being able to attach a Python or Lua script directly to a given device event. Instead, we have Groovy, which is OK as far as it goes, but organized into "apps" that have no organizational relationship to the devices they're managing. Also, it looks like the scripting itself is not customizable (no custom or add-on libraries) and, from the messages I've read on the community website, the company has a rather arrogant position to the effect that it's going to remain this way. Whatever. If the built-in apps actually worked, this wouldn't bother me as much as it does.(IMPORTANT NOTE: I haven't fully explored the apps area as of this writing, and I could be completely wrong about all of this. If so, I will update this review and include a humble apology to the company. But I don't think I am.)Bottom line: This device has tremendous potential, filling a need that few if any other companies are addressing. As of now, however, that potential is some distance from being realized. I will note that all of the available apps seem to be under active development, so this could change quickly. At least for now though, this thing is no more reliable than the X10 gear it replaced. Three stars, mostly because the hardware seems good and the company looks to be actively enhancing the software. Will update if/when the situation here changes.UPDATE, about a year and a half and several software updates later:My biggest problem with this device appears to have been resolved - it's been months since this thing has failed to respond to a switch command, or delayed the response more than a second or so. The lag is still longer than I'd prefer - a second is a LONG time with modern CPUs; I was expecting a quarter that or less - but acceptable.Unfortunately, my second biggest problem remains unresolved. It is still unreasonably difficult to program the hub for more than simple trigger/action operations. I recently set up an away-from-home rule set that switches the now-four Z-wave-enabled lights in the house on and off to mimic the typical light usage while I'm at home: office lights on during the day and maybe an hour or two at night, living room lamp on from sunset to 11ish, that kind of thing, ideally with some random variation so they wouldn't go on/off at the same times every day. It took me over an hour of clicking and drop-down selecting and entering and updating - and, entirely too often, editing or removing rules that somehow didn't end up the way I wanted them - to get even close to what I'd had in mind. (And my initial test shows that it may still not be working "right".) What bugs me about this whole process is that I could define this rule set in about a half-dozen lines of Python or JavaScript code, total elapsed time about five minutes. I very much wish that the hub offered an "expert" mode that would let you simply enter a javascript or python...or, hell, java or ruby or even BASIC, script, save it and have it execute without having to go through the throes of putting together a custom "app" in Groovy for each individual function you want. I want this badly enough that I'm considering investing in a multi-protocol transceiver and a small Atom motherboard, rolling my own HA hub with Home Assistant on Linux, and abandoning the Hubitat altogether.Sum of topic: The Elevation box has improved quite a bit in the past 18-odd months, but it's still nowhere near the open, ultra-flexible home automation platform Hubitat makes it out to be. It's usable, but that's all. Sticking with the three stars.UPDATE, another year and a half and several more software updates later: My core opinion of this device remains *mostly* unchanged. Hubitat has done quite a bit to improve the user interface, but in my opinion it is still unreasonably difficult to set up anything resembling complex actions among multiple devices. There are, however, three saving graces that has caused me to bump my rating to about 4 1/2 stars, rounded up to five because I just realized that, despite its shortcomings, I'm still using this thing after five years:First, they are still supporting this thing after five years. That's refreshing in an industry that doesn't like to spend money on supporting older hardware, and rarely hesitates to leave you hanging when they decide it's no longer profitable. The updates are periodic and have almost always been worthwhile. Compared to when I bought this, it's faster, more reliable, easier to set up - relatively speaking; it was almost unusable at first - and supports more devices and protocols.Second, they added an app that provides a decent API. This lets you control the box from other computers on your home network with reasonably simple commands supported by almost any PC that can plug into a network. This lets me work around the Elevation's scripting shortcomings with Python and shell scripts running on my home server. I'm an IT professional so I may well be biased in this regard, but for me, setting up activities involving multiple conditions and actions affecting multiple devices is a LOT easier in Python than on Hubitat's platform. I still wish I could do Python directly on the box, but this is good enough. (Actually, looking at Home Assistant integration is on my to-do list. It looks possible, and would be the proverbial game-changer if it works well.)Third, the price has come down somewhat. Not a lot, but combined with the API this changes the buy-build equation a great deal. As a home automation hub, it's still mediocre. As a sophisticated, multi-protocol, networkable HA device controller, it's a bargain.So after five years I've finally come to appreciate this thing. I'm even considering looking at the C-8 Pro to take advantage of the newer protocols my newer HA devices support. Good job, Hubitat.
L**S
Impressive, works great even with no internet
The title sums it all up. This hub is amazing in what it can do and the level of customization you can accomplish even without coding. It works locally, so it's way faster than all those cloud-tethered hubs.Now, you can get the basics running in no time, but to do the advanced stuff that really makes this hub shine, you will need to deal with some complex logic.The main drawback is that this is not very user-friendly. The UI is awkward and unpolished, with weird quirks (once you know them, you can work around them but it's annoying and gives very bad first impressions that everything is broken!!).The iphone app is also more of a prototype that doesn't do much, but it's better than nothing. Since I can still use my Alexa app to control my devices when I'm away, this was not a show stopper for me.UPDATE:After using this for a long time, I am happy to report that they have improved the functionality and made things less awkward in the UI. The new built-in apps as well as community-created ones, covered all the weird devices I got over the years and are working great. They are keeping up well.While it works without Internet, it's easy to integrate with cloud services and other systems. I have mine connected to my security camera's NVR, my Apple Watch, and Alexa. Everything is working seamlessly, although it took some effort to connect everything just the way I want them.Still strongly recommended after all that time.
F**1
I use this device as a centralized control for both security and home automation
I've had this hub installed for about three months now and it seems to be working well. Not that I didn't have much difficulty at first because there is quite a learning curve, and I still have devices that I'm learning how to connect. This device has limited range when setting up new devices, but after setup, most devices use one of the mesh technologies to compensate for that initial limitation. That's why it's important to find a good location for it, provide a battery backup, and standardize on certain technologies, but not get locked into a single vendor's products. One of the reasons to use this hub is to be more independent from cloud based hubs, particularly for security devices. So, I tried to limit the number of switches and lights that needed third party apps to run. My environment would mostly use "Konnected" and Alexa devices. For example, Alexa tells me when Konnected detects doors open or closed, and that information is sent through the hub interface. Still, I ended up with some other devices that advertised to be compatible with Alexa but still needed third party apps. I also wanted the Hub to be the central control point for programming scripts, but I ended up having to write several routines in Alexa, some that conflicted with the hub because I've not yet been able to send information from Alexa controlled devices back to the hub to detect and manage. I expect Alexa to remain proprietary in that respect and difficult to communicate with. They are in the business of selling their own devices. Alexa basically only acknowledges Hubitat switches, so it's also difficult to work around that limitation by effectively creating and using variables and virtual devices. The hub database seems to be fairly stable if you remember to set the records properly and not exit a routine before a record gets updated. I had difficulty setting up some devices because of the way the screens are forced to handle the database interface. I can see how this might be difficult for not technical customers to learn and would expect Hubitat to try to make that more user friendly in the future. Hubitat has a community of talented programmers who write interface routines for some of the still incompatible devices, but these require a lot of flashing of devices and is still mostly in the hobbyist circles. I particularly want generic camera interfaces so that I can use the motion detection of my IP cameras as motion detect devices to my hub. Why purchase motion detectors when I have 16 cameras that already have that feature that could trigger events in the hub? So, bottom line is that Hubitat is a very good product that seems to be at least as good as the major brands. It's strength is its speed and flexibility. It might have began its life as Samsung compatible hub, but its not confined to any specific vendor now. Its weakness is that many of its features are not easily available to the general public outside of hobbyists. But, instead of becoming vendor locked, it means that there are many options for providing solutions to certain tasks. You may not have to purchase an expensive vendor specific garage door opener, fishtank, or fireplace starter, for example. Instead, you might program a Sonoff or similar device, depending on interface requirements. The hub is much faster than cloud based systems, and having local control is better for my security devices. The system configuration can be backed up and restored locally too.
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