Author: Craig Lloyd / Source: howtogeek.com
A hub for this and a hub for that. When you dive into the smarthome market, you’re inevitably going to end up with a handful of smarthome hubs taking over your house. It’s annoying, but it’s probably not going to get any better.
RELATED: How to Put Together Your First Smarthome (Without Getting Overwhelmed)
Don’t get me wrong; these hubs are an important component to any smart home and they have purpose.
They make it a lot easier to manage a ton of devices when you end up having a sensor for every door and window, and a smart light switch in every room. But it gets a little ridiculous when so many smarthome products not only require a hub to function, but require their own proprietary hub.There Are Agreed-Upon Wireless Standards, but It Doesn’t Matter
While some companies do create their own wireless protocol, it’s not a super widespread practice. There are agreed-upon standards already in place. Z-Wave and ZigBee are the two most widely-accepted wireless protocols used in the smarthome world, and a huge chunk of smarthome devices use one or the other (or both). This alone should make you believe that connecting smarthome devices together is pretty straightforward, but that’s far from the truth.
As I mentioned in the past when discussing Z-Wave and ZigBee, many smarthome companies add a bit of their own proprietary nonsense to their products, even if they end up utilizing Z-Wave or ZigBee, which makes it difficult to know if one device will connect to another, even if they use the same exact protocol.
For example, this Z-Wave garage door tilt sensor from Monoprice won’t work with the Wink Hub, even though the hub fully supports Z-Wave devices.
Why? Who knows.
Furthermore, the ever-popular Philips Hue lighting system uses ZigBee, which numerous smarthome hubs support. Yet Philips requires its own “Hue Bridge” in order to set up and use the bulbs. On top of that, third-party support for other ZigBee smart bulbs is limited. And the same goes for Belkin’s long-gone WeMo Link hub—it used to work with any ZigBee bulb, but eventually was updated to only work with a very small list of pre-approved bulbs.
I’m sure this is largely due to some of these companies not wanting to put up with any weird inconsistencies when you add third-party devices and mix them in with their own devices, but it’s still…
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