SmartThings' Rumbles & Rambles ~ I am sufficiently concerned with Samsung's/SmartThings' (ST) cavalier treatment of my data and their pending pricing for access to my own systems that it prompted a complete migration. "Cavalier" is code for data broker sales and advertising "sharing." I am migrating off of ST to Home Assistant OS (HA or HAOS) for my longstanding IoT network @ Blodgett. HAOS is a solid open systems project doing all that I do with ST, and more, and it is backed by a strong community of contributors. The migration is not simple but necessary to get all my shit under my own control and out of the cloud. The first steps were to get an HAOS system up which supports Zigbee and ZWave and then to "migrate" my sensor array from ST to HA. Here's the kit today with keen ZWave Plus and Zigbee 3 antennas (coordinators) and dedicated future-proofed hardware for HA.
ST > HAOS "Migration" ~ I wish there were a migrate button but the fact is that making this shift requires a careful build up of drivers and applications on HAOS and a methodical deinstallation of sensors, switches, alerting, and automations from ST and a rebuild of same on HAOS. Frankly days of work for the HA neophyte... fortunately it is a pretty decent and secure system & community. Plus, Claude helped plenty guiding with stepwise moves; I did a lot of groping as well though. I began installing the core Zigbee and ZWave support infrastructure and then moved on to removing sensors and lights/switches from ST and adding same back into HA. Here's the Zigbee subsystem with Mosquito, MQTT, my antenna, and some initial sensors and lights migrated. I like automatic lighting on stairs, 'cause I'm old. Ultimately simple automation was used: "if present at top or bottom of stairs and it's not daylight, light it up." But, that took some work.
ZWave Is More Secure ~ A lot of my IoT install is ZWave and ZWave Plus (800 class chips), which is more secure. But, it comes with some management issues, like disassociating from existing ZWave nets before joining a new one (network info persists). I went sensor by sensor, removing stuff from ST and then adding same back to HA... brutal as it required decent access to each sensor and switch to "exclude" on the old and then "discover" on the new. It's good the new system has the dials I want to assure security. Here's the ZWave subsystem adding new S2/S3 secure devices. I've added the needed "automations" for these too ~ "if there's a water leak, notify me" or "if there's door opening while I'm away alert me." Work but I understand what I want and am methodically building it.
Tailscale/Wireguard VPN and Remote Access To HA, AI, And SMB ~ I've used Wireguard point-2-point but it is a challenge to configure and I had to build a split tunnel in Summit to simultaneously connect to Blodgett and the Internet. However, Matt taught me Tailscale today, which runs on top of Wireguard and handles so much of the dirty work. We now have a "tailnet" where I can get access to Matt's AI Appliance for relatively free locally-hosted LLM chats (my work processes can't be absorbed by OpenAI or Anthropic now). He gains access to my Plex server and TBs of media. He built a nice ChatGPT chat front end for me so I can use his locally hosted models. Here is me using qwen on our tailnet. And the tailnet is also active on iOS and therefor I can just run the Home Assistant Companion app without having to pay or enable "cloud access" or poking port forwards when I am remote from Blodgett as I added Tailnet to HA. And I can run queries on qwen anywhere. I've moved completely away from Google Drive as well and encrypted VPNs give me confident but unfettered access to all the files on my server ~ here I'm just showing access to manuals I store there (I store all User Guides and Manuals on my drive as I never know when I might need access to documentation) over 5Ge cellular... though now I have qwen I can ask in real time. Free, and open, and local is better.
Home Assistant Next Steps ~ With ZWave stuff migrated, automations updated, and Tailscale allowing Kala and me remote access to HA for notifications, etc I need to expand the use cases for HA and eliminate more cloud-based, service-pricing-based vendors. SmartThings and Google are toast, who's next? I also have significant networks of weather sensors in Summit and Blodgett, from Acurite, whose integrations are in the cloud. Those sensors feed panels in my homes but also are transferred through a gateway to "myAcurite" website and also to WUnderground for crowd-sourced weather offers. I bought the 433Mhz antenna and associated SDR dongle for HA and plan to dive on receiving stuff directly from my Acurite sensors and publishing my data directly to WUnderground. That's still in the cloud of course but in my control, and an open project. More coding required qwen & Claude. Could be certification issues but I'll let you know. The next big "cloud elimination" is Arlo. I've used this motion detecting camera system and cloud recording effectively for years in El Paso and Summit... it helps secure my remote sites. I need to migrate all that motion-cam-recording stuff away from Arlo (now $30/mo/site) to a self-hosted scheme on HA.
Update 28Oct26 ~ HA Solid; New UPS; New Overview... With everything on ST migrated to the new Home Assistant system I am very pleased with reliability, operability, and configurability. HA is just better, especially with Tailscale for remote access assurance. I've added some automations, new integrations and the like, and I have proper HA and iOS notifications sent to Kala & me on specific events like "Fire Detected @ Blodgett" or "Leak Detected @ Blodgett Kitchen." I worked a "new" dashboard (really modifying the Overview dashboard) to best meet our needs. It's the exact same on the web UI and in the iOS companion app.
I also added an Uninterruptible Power Supply in Blodgett, a 1000w CyberPower UPS, backing the HA system, my communications hardware, and my home server. It's about 1/3 the size of a tower PC. I connected it to HA and added alerting schemes to tell me of a power outage and restoration. It's not really a big benefit till I determine whether I add a failover ISP scheme, but it's cool and I can do softer hardware landings now if needed. Outages would likely outlast my batteries.
