Martin | Dec. 28, 2019

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Andrew | Oct. 24, 2018

Adam | Oct. 20, 2018

Christopher | Aug. 30, 2018

Justin | Aug. 15, 2018

Failed from the start

Ordered the Pi Shield and the USB equivalent. Shipping took weeks, which was annoying, but it came from China, so not too surprising. There was tracking available, but it does not provide any ETA, which is the part that needs improvement.

I installed the Pi Shield on my RP3 per the instructions, disabled bluetooth via dtoverlay=pi3-miniuart-bt, and found where the device was listed by the OS. Upon adding the ZHA component to my configuration.yaml and rebooting, Home Assistant would no longer load. I had to SSH in and remove the ZHA config before services would come back up. That's as far as I ever got with the Pi Shield.

With the Shield not working, I tried the USB stick instead. Only had to change the config file from /dev/ttyAMA0 to /dev/ttyUSB0 since both were listed under /dev/. With the new configuration.yaml ZHA settings, Home Assistant actually booted. I was even able to link 3 Centralite motion sensors with it and automate lamps turning on for a period when I walked into a room at night. Very convenient. Then about 2.5 days later, at 3:00 PM when nothing was happening in or around the house, all three devices stopped updating. Either all three defected at the same time, or the receiver gave out. Leaning towards the receiver. 1 star for that, too.

Since both versions of the product ended up failing rather miserably, I'm going to stand the SmartThings Hub back up, configure MQTT, and use that instead. It ran reliably for months without issue. I was just trying to avoid having a cloud-based component since I shouldn't need an ISP to turn on a light in the other room.

Response from Elelabs | Aug. 15, 2018

Hello Justin,

Thank you for the review.
It is sad, that you had such a bad experience with our products.

The only thing, that I would like to point out here is that our products (both Raspberry Pi Shield and USB adapter) only provide the interface to the ZigBee world.
The automation, device handlers, even the OS in your case is provided from Home Assistant project. That's an Open Source project, and everyone's contribution is welcome. You can use our products with different Host software, like Home Assistant or OpenHAB projects, or even write your own software, using Python, Node.js or C libraries. For our DIY line of products, we focus on providing the hardware, which you can use differently.

To sum it up: for now, SmartThings Hub indeed is a more mature and stable option, but I would hope that you will check the Home Assistant Github every once in a while to check if the issues, you mentioned, are resolved.

Gleb | Aug. 5, 2018

Phillip | June 23, 2018