Well, I guess it's true, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. That's kinda how I feel about WebThings. That's probably not fair. It's a nice, easy to use platform, but I just ran into the limitations of it much quicker than I expected. But it's young, I'm sure it will grow.
So, the problem I ran into with Webthings was it's rules engine. The rules are very simple to set up. You drag a trigger to the left side of the screen and an output to the right side of the screen. Set your parameters and bingo, you've got a rule. But, in that simplicity is also it's downfall (in my eyes). Remember that Action I talked about in the previous post where I could give it an intensity and a duration and it would fade to that given intensity over the given duration? Well, that action didn't show up when setting rules up. My Actions without parameters did, but not that one. After some googling, I found out that there is an open issue on the WebThings GitHub page for supporting Actions with parameters. I think it's on the backlog, but it's been open for 2+ years. I'm not holding my breath.
So, I decided to move to Home Assistant. I backed up the image of WebThings (just in case) and downloaded and flashed Home Assistant. It is a much more mature product. Things like fading over time can be handled right in the rules (Automatons in HA). It supported my combo ZWave/Zigbee stick and has a huge list of Integrations and supported devices. It also has the ability to use ESP32s as a device through ESPHome. However, it is a plugin for HA and you write the programs in YAML. I'm not sure how I feel about that. It may warrant some investigation in the future. But for now, I think I'll stick with programming in PlatformIO and using something MQTT for communication. Here's an article that outlines the general idea here.
Moving to HA hasn't been all champagne and caviar though. I am having some issues with my ZWave now. Mind you, I have not moved the Pi that's acting as the hub, and I have not changed the outlet that I'm controlling. But now, the ZWave device will work for a few second to several minutes, and then get reported as "Dead" in HA. Before I realized what this means, I tried several things to fix the issue, including a factory reset on the plug, removing and including the plug and completely re-installing HA. I should have read some first. Now, after some research, I can usually fix the issue by going into the ZWave configuration, selecting the device and issuing the "Test Node" command. Everything I've read says that it's either a range issue, or my network isn't robust enough. Well, I call BS on that. It was rock solid under WebThings and the only thing that changed was the software running it. But, I'm not going to focus on ZWave for the time being. My multi-colored kitchen lights are going to run off wifi. I'm sure I'll come back to it at some point.
Time to learn some MQTT!