-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 52
Introduction to Tasmota for Hubitat Elevation (T4HE)
Many people who enter the realm of Home Automation do so by initially purchasing a few cheap bulbs or plugs. Early success leads to further purchases and consumers soon find themselves with a variety of apps on their phones such as SmartLife, Kasa, eWeLink, IFTTT and others on their phones and tablets.
It’s about this time that consumers start to realize that having all these disparate systems really makes home automation challenging. Integrations between these systems are usually cloud based, often challenging to integrate, slow and have significant security concerns.
At some point many consumers realize the need for a true Home Automation system vs making purchasing decisions based upon the spot price of a bulb or plug. Buying a home automation hub is cheap, but what of all their existing devices which are not compatible.
Technically savvy consumers will find that they can jailbreak many of their old devices by flashing them with Tasmota firmware and thus make them available for use in a range of Home Automation (HA) solutions. But there is one barrier. In order to connect a Tasmota device to a HA system it needs a device driver (aka device handler in ST) to perform the communication between the two devices. Many Home Automation systems have Tasmota drivers for specific devices written by enthusiasts to differing levels of quality and consistency. Finding the right device driver takes time and does not guarantee a positive outcome. Home automation should not be that difficult. Tasmota for Hubitat Elevation is the first holistic approach to integrating Tasmota devices to Hubitat in a consistent and approachable way. Developed by a professional developer with a Master in Computer Science, it offers an unprecedented level of integration between two very powerful platforms, Tasmota and Hubitat. Tasmota for Hubitat Elevation (aka T4HE) offers the following advantages:
- T4HE will automatically discover all the attributes of a device and configure child drivers for each device. For example, a power outlet with two separate switches will each get its own child device that can be turned on/off independently. T4HE takes all the guesswork out of device driver selection by doing all the work for you.
- T4HE works with standard Tasmota 7.1.2 or above.
- T4HE provides an optional, but strongly recommended, Tasmota firmware with Hubitat support. Using this firmware allows instant bi-directional communication that immediately synchronizes the actual device with Hubitat. For example, going to a Tasmota device web page and turning it off will result in Hubitat being immediately notified and updating its state.
- T4HE performs a presence check on Tasmota devices. This “presence” attribute indicator is accessible in Hubitat and could be used to generate events, actions or alerts if a device goes offline.
- T4HE does not use any form of polling so it has very little impact on the performance of the hub.
- T4HE synchronizes key information with Tasmota such as device name and time zone.
- T4HE exposes many useful Tasmota attributes such as uptime, Wifi, module, presence and power stats (if available) in a consistent manner across all devices.
- T4HE is an extensible model that supports the addition of specialized drivers that operate under the same parent driver for a consistent overall experience. These specialized drivers are for use with less common devices such as sensors, curtains, power monitoring etc. Many of these drivers have already been developed and are available for download.