Solid state relays

I suppose that's why I posted all that. I've tried home automation for 10 yrs and hubitat is the first hub I have ever seen that is reliable. I'll post a list of the rules currently running below. It has all executed flawlessly for over 6 months. The few times there were problems, it was something other than hubitat e.g. a bad cable etc. Latency with motion switched lighting is <100 ms always, good enough to rely on with no maintenance. You can also quickly (<5 mins) make a dashboard for a room or any group of interest, I'll post a pic of that too.

 

I spent 22 years working for SIEMENS on rail electrification and we did a job for Amtrak once were they had two cabinets the size of a refrigerator with clunk and bump relays top to bottom, some of their guys were admiring these relays and I said “ you know that SIEMENS make a gizmo smaller that a toaster that will do more for you that these two cabinets full of relays” , their reply... these have worked for us since the 30’s!

 

Siri and ecobee both integrate into hubitat. I keep Siri turned off, but I can access everything in the ecobee and can access the motion and temp sensors in the Lil'bee as a separate device. For garage door I used opengarage which ties into hubitat too by calling URLs. Hubitat also does geofencing based on phone GPS or pinging your phone via WiFi.

 

Even the microprocessor based stuff for rail isn't that small, but yeah, relays are a well understood system that people really like. All the complexity is visible and with simple tools you can debug them on the spot. Not so much with microcontroller stuff, all the complexity is buried in a file that you need a computer and some crappy software to interpret.