HCA Weekly Reader for the week of 20-Mar-2022

Home Control Assistant Newsletter for Mar 20 2022

Have you read the Important Announcement posted on August 1, 2021? If you haven't you need to.

Hubitat

In the continuing series of notes about replacing HCA with Hubitat, here is an interim step. This work was created by an HCA user who wanted to configure HCA to handle actions from a ZWave switch. The technique uses the Hubitat “rules machine” to POST messages to HCA in the same form as HCA is already expecting for state updates. In the users design he is then processing those messages using a program that receives the message once normal processing of it is complete.

It's online as technical note #701 on the technical notes page of the support website.

https://www.homecontrolassistant.com/tech-notes.php

If you are using a version of HCA prior to version 17, you may have questions about the wisdom of upgrading to version 17 given the future of HCA. Here is something to consider:

The support policy for older HCA versions has been changed as I can no longer devote time to past version users. Support will only be available for HCA 17 users.

If you are on version 16 or earlier and want to continue using the cloud features and want to be assured that if you have a question that it gets answered, it is indeed time to upgrade.

HCA is fully operational for several more years so the update cost, spread out over that time, is very little. Knowing support is available when you need it is worth it.

Upgrade to HCA 17

Anyone who is using Hubitat with HCA – not SmartThings – please drop me a note as I would like to add you to a discussion list for those users. I have some Hubitat ideas that I would like to “kick around” and it would help to have a group of users who have experience with Hubitat. Please just send a note to the regular support address saying you would like to be added to that discussion list.