Smart Home Hubs 101 - The Ultimate Guide

Smart

home

hubs

are one of the most confusing aspects of building a

smart

home

, and yet they can be the key to success. They are often the brains of your

smart

home, but usually they are a little mystery box, so today's video is intended to be a complete

guide

. to understand what a smart home hub is, what it does, when to use one of the best ways or practices with a hub and towards the end of the video I will give you details on some of the most popular

hubs

available so you can choose one or some to put in your home hello automators thanks for tuning in again i'm brian from automate your life and if you're new here and you're feeling a little confused during today's video, of course you can ask questions in the comments, but you should know.

I also made a video called how to build a smart home 101, which is more of a

guide

to getting started building a smart home, so if you need to start from scratch, check out the links in the description below, I realize. This video is long, but the good news is that you can come back to it at any time and pick up where you left off. I've also added timecodes below to help you jump in and get the information you need, but let's start with the smart stuff. Home Hub is the definition of a smart home hub that has changed significantly in recent years and will continue to change, so I'll give you a very basic definition and then we'll delve into what a hub looks like today.

The basic definition of a smart home hub is the brain of your smart home. It's a controller with processing power and some memory that connects to many smart home products. It allows you to create and run automations and provides a platform or software for other functions that help. you organize, maintain and build a smart home. Most of the smart home hubs we use are physical devices that look like small white or black boxes, they will be located somewhere in your home and connect to your home network via Wi-Fi or Ethernet. To connect to other smart products, they likely also have radios for other wireless technologies.

Smart home products use such wireless technologies as wi-fi zigbee z-wave thread lora and bluetooth, plus some hubs contain technologies such as infrared receivers or blasters. or even some that emit other radio frequencies nowadays, a smart home hub can come in the form of that small white or black box, it can be so small that it is difficult to understand, it can be located inside a camera like these from Akara and it can be part of a smart speaker like those from Amazon, Google or Apple and it can even be a piece of software that could run on your phone as an app or on a web server somewhere else in the world, as if this is what another in order.

To fully understand why we use hubs, we need to understand what they can do and how they contribute to an overall smart home. The fact is that a smart home only works well if all our devices can communicate with each other, the devices must be able to do that. exchange signals back and forth to make what we want to happen now happen. Our definition of a smart home hub identified two main characteristics that are important to this goal. The first is that hubs must be able to communicate with many smart home products. There are many. different ways for these products to do that and I just named the technologies that have been developed to help with this, each technology has its benefits and disadvantages, but let's say we have a smart light bulb and let's say this product says on the box that it requires a smart home hub, what that means for your smart home is that the smart bulb alone can't communicate with the other devices in your home without that smart home hub speaking for them, it's like a translator, so? what's going on?

If you connect this smart bulb directly to your smart home hub, in most cases you do it with an app, then the smart home hub has more powerful features and more ways to communicate with the rest of your smart home, it becomes at the front door to and from your smart bulb to the rest of your home, since we know that your smart home hub will connect via Wi-Fi or Ethernet to your home network, it has made it a step easier for everything else in your home to communicate with that bulb, there's more to it now, but the hub can now pass on the signals your smart bulb needs to receive or send as needed.

Those signals that turn off are a state of the smart bulb, which would mean that it reports things like whether it is on or off, the brightness and perhaps the color or color temperature. The signals that come in could be commands from other hub applications and Plus, this brings us to the second feature that is the definition of a smart home hub, that is, we can create and run automations with the hub, this is how you save time. and it can save money in your life or create convenience and security, so that's really where the rubber hits the road.

I'm going to borrow something from our previous video on building a smart home 101 where I explained the anatomy of an automation in summary and the automation includes at least one trigger or condition that starts the automation and at least one action that executes the trigger and the Action devices do not have the intelligence necessary to create, execute and manage that automation process, instead, the brain power lies at the center, so When we return to our smart light bulb example, we need a trigger. or a reason why we want that smart light bulb to turn on. Let's say we want the smart bulb to turn on every time we enter a room, so we also have to connect a motion sensor to our smart home hub once we have done that, the smart home hub can communicate both with the bulb as with the motion sensor and when the motion sensor sees movement it sends a signal to the center which it then uses to decide.

To turn on the smart bulb, some hubs will give you options for multiple conditions and some hubs will give you multiple actions. Each hub will have different options for what those conditions and actions may be and there are other differences that I will explain as we go. In the video, you now know a little more about what a smart home hub does with automations, but a good hub allows you to do many more scenes. It is an important feature nowadays as it is a faster way to turn on or configure smart devices with exact precision. the way you want them to be in a certain situation, a great example of this is when you go downstairs to watch a movie in the movie theater, you probably want to set up a movie watching scene where you can dim the lights, turn on the lighting behind of a television.

Turn on an AV system, a smart streaming device, and because movie theaters can get a little warm, you can turn on a fan or set your home thermostat to a lower temperature. There are all kinds of things you can do with a smart home hub within a scene. but this brings us to another feature that is more important or at least from my perspective, but you won't find it in all smart home hubs. These are called modes and you can turn them on or off depending on what activity you are doing or what situation your home is in, that mode can be used as a condition for any other automation running, so when we think about that movie watching scene , we can really improve it by activating the movie viewing mode on our smart home hub. that's ignoring certain automations that I don't want to run when the mode is on.

A great example of this is if I have a motion sensor in the area that controls my lights, then I probably don't want that. It turns on every time someone moves a little in the room while we're watching a movie. There's a lot more that can be done with hubs, but I think you're getting the gist now: another feature that may or may not exist on your smartphone. Home centers are an option for home security. Personally, I think it is very important to have this on at least one smart home hub in your home because it will give you self-monitoring options for home security or connect you with a professional monitoring service for paid smart home hubs that provide this to They often connect well to some smart security cameras, as well as other devices that can protect your home and notify you when an event has occurred.

Many hubs and actually the applications they are connected to can connect to other services. and then those services can sometimes be used in automations that run on the hub. A great example of this is Amazon's echo speakers that allow music or radio to be started within your routines, plus a common request is to announce something through those speakers which is an attached service. Voice assistant services like this lead to life automation as much as home automation and I think you'll find this is the future of many hubs or apps that connect to hubs. More complex hubs and platforms have options for scripted automations. or coding this can give you an incredible level of control in determining when and how an automation runs in your home, but that obviously requires another level of skill compared to simply creating automations in an app and when smart home hubs become truly large and complex, they begin to become an ecosystem of their own, something like an app store, the largest hubs and applications allow developers to create what is called a skill or an action or a smart application that can be installed or simply enabled within the application and then can run on the hub, this can make the functions of your hub infinite and depending on how many people are interested in developing solutions for that hub, in many cases companies will create these small applications or small solutions within their hub software and they will implement them themselves, but you can have both.

These Feature Sources Probably the biggest question people have about a smart home hub is whether they actually get one. The question of when to use a smart home hub and when not to use it is quite complex, but let me try to boil it down. This comes down to a few reasons for and against having one. Here is the list of reasons why feel free to add your own reason in the comments below so that people can read them. Most smart home hubs will allow you to do more complex automations. Closer to the reality of your life, you still have to buy the right hub for your situation, but that's a huge benefit compared to a couple of devices in one app.

Placing too many devices on your home Wi-Fi system can bring down your entire smart home. Additionally, no matter what router or mesh Wi-Fi system you have, they will reach a limit on the number of devices and begin to drop connections to your equipment, and in that sense, there are many reasons to use other wireless technologies that are available in smart devices. Home hubs, one of the most important, are more suitable for certain types of devices or certain situations, for example, zigbee z-wave thread lora and even ble or bluetooth low energy are all low power networks, so which are better for the battery.

Powered devices like sensors, the lower carrier frequencies used in Z-Wave and LoRA make them best suited around reflective surfaces or in areas of your home where WiFi has a hard time staying reliable. If you've ever tried to automate around a refrigerator, know this outside: Lora can travel a quarter of a mile and the Z wave and thread can travel a hundred feet on average. Zigbee Wi-Fi and Bluetooth generally carry a shorter distance, and sometimes you're simply looking for a product that doesn't exist. Unless you use a hub, Z-Wave and Zigbee have a long history compared to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in the smart home space, so there are additional options and when you've found a specific device you want to use but requires a hub, yes.

If you are stuck, a great example is when you find something unique like this smart button pusher from switchbot, it is a bluetooth product and requires your hub to be controlled by voice or through automations and perhaps the most important reason is that smart home hubs They add everything in your home, but they also add the smart home industry, since theProviders don't have to produce connectivity for hundreds of thousands of products available today, which means more companies can produce connections to their hub and often means that a hub will connect to almost everything. in your home, whether through a cloud connection or a local network connection, and speaking of local network connections, there is definitely a higher percentage of automations and products that you will be able to bring into your home that will work locally with a hub and, Therefore, it will not be necessary for the Internet to be available in your home, now each center has its nuances in this regard, but this is also a trend that we are seeing in the industry towards local connectivity, so there are many reasons to purchase a smart home hub, but there are a few reasons not to need one, I think the most important is when you are looking for just a few features, for example, you want the lights to turn on at a certain time of day or you want a doorbell that notifies you when someone is on the door or a The package has been removed.

Those simple use cases traditionally don't need a hub if you're not going to be a big user of automations and you really just want to add some cool features that you can initiate with voice or with an app on your phone then you don't need a hub again, many people Enter the smart home space by purchasing a video doorbell, smart thermostat or perhaps a smart door lock, most of them are pretty comprehensive in terms of the features they provide and you don't usually need a hub with them, there are a few features where centers improve these situations, but for most people they are just looking for notifications and control from an app or, in the case of a smart thermostat control, automatically lowering their bill overall, I think it's pretty clear that Smart home hubs give you the opportunity to build complexity into your automations and really allow you to grow your smart home.

Other solutions that do not include a hub will limit you in many ways. With this in mind, let's look at how your home will be organized with a smart home hub and how it brings those extra layers of features. If you don't organize how your smart home works, you'll end up in a state of chaos or you'll just end up feeling less satisfied with what you've made and what you've bought, so over time I've created a hierarchy of smart home functions or automations and how I organize my home around them, and here are the seven things you should include in your hierarchy modes number one number two scenes number three automations or routines number four a dashboard number five voice control number six buttons or pushbuttons or switches and number seven apps Now think of a mode as an activity you're doing or a state you want to put your smart home in, I already gave you the example of where you might head to an entertainment area for a movie night and turn on the mode TV time which can then ignore certain automations, such as turning on the lights based on movement in the area, but another way is if you have left your house and want to receive security notifications, those two modes will never coincide or at least they shouldn't, but you may have the opportunity for two or more modes to happen at the same time.

At the same time, most modern hubs won't allow you to have two modes enabled at the same time; In fact, many don't even have a modes feature and you need to create them now. I'll call this a smart home 301 level concept, but I'll establish a baseline. We're presenting it here so you can start to consider how you might make this happen if your facility has the multiple conditions feature within automations. You can make this happen indirectly. Let's imagine that we have an automation that we don't want to run. when our house is in TV mode, in this case let's go back to our simple motion sensor automation that turns on a light bulb in the space when movement or movement is detected if we could add an additional condition that said the house was not in time mode TV, then we could stop this from working now if you consider that you can name a light bulb or a smart plug whatever you want, then there is no reason why you can't use a light bulb in your basement as an indicator so that the TV time mode television is active, you can decide in other automations how to activate or deactivate it.

The other way to do it is through virtual devices that some centers allow you to create, that is an easier way to do it and if you are familiar with programming, really what you have with virtual devices is a variable that you can then program through your smart home and finally, as I know a lot of people use Amazon and their voice assistant, they actually give you a couple of ways to overlay your automations, the first is the time frame as the second condition and the second is the ability to enable and disable automations. I know this is a pretty complex topic, but I hope this has given you an idea of ​​how to do it at home next time.

The automation layer is a scene. Scenes are now used to turn multiple devices on or off at once and/or multiple devices can be set to a specific appearance. It's really just a way to organize your home in consistent situations. I think this is a great example of Here's when you walk into a home office, you may have a different look than you want compared to your spouse and you may even use different equipment if each of you has a scene created that you set up the space the way you want and then convert that. within other automations or across modes will make it easier to organize your automations.

Now there's really no reason you can't just put all the different actions you want to happen in a scene into one automation, so scenes aren't really necessary. It just helps things look cleaner and makes it easier for you to understand how and why something happens when you have to troubleshoot in the future and that brings me to routines or automations, which is the next layer of how to develop your routines. smart home and automations as a term are actually the same thing and what is happening is that a triggering event or a series of conditions has caused an action or a series of actions to occur;

In all cases, the actions will happen sequentially because that is how computers and processing work today. so the order of an automation can really matter what you experience, this is even when it seems to be happening all at once, the options you will have for starting a routine or automation are based on a number of factors, number one. the center you have, number two the location where you live or where your account is based, number three the devices you have in your home, including a device that has different options than another device of the same type, so these two Motion sensors may have different options although they are actually the same device, the services and applications, skills or functions that you have enabled on your hub and the other hubs or systems that you have connected to your hub, the same factors actually determine the type of actions you have access to in your automations, however you may have some additional conditions or additional ways to increase those conditions, for example, when I use Samsung SmartThings with a smart bulb, I can check the dimming level of that smart bulb as part of my conditions, however, smartthings gives us the option of let's say it's exactly a certain percentage of brightness or we can choose equal to or greater than a certain percentage of brightness or equal to or less than a certain percentage on the action side.

You may also have more options depending on your hub. You may have the option to delay a few seconds. or even hours or you may be able to automatically turn off a device after it has been on for a set period of time. There are also toggle type actions on certain hubs, so if it's on it turns off, if it's off it continues and maybe The biggest difference you'll find between hubs is the features you get from the original smart device app, for What a great example of this comes from Govi ​​Lighting. Your lighting is Bluetooth or Wi-Fi and when it is Wi-Fi you can usually connect. to voice assistance from amazon and google, these act as your hub when we get into routines. govi with amazon has a ton of features whereas when you look at google routines it is much more difficult to use govi scenes and in some cases you can't even make certain features happen so that the modes, scenes, routines and automations control your home in these automatic ways that you don't really have to think about, that's good, but the problem is what happens if you want to avoid those automatic ways that your home is controlled, this is where some more instant forms of control come in handy, they are sole control, but they have their own reasons for existing.

The next layer of your smart home organization is a dashboard and with some hubs you'll get a dashboard you can't. Really personalize the best example of this is smart displays from Amazon or Google or even on an iPad or iPhone with the Apple Home app. However, more complex hubs give you access to more sophisticated options for creating a dashboard and there are even third-party dashboard creation tools. that can really help you take your board to the next level. Typically with these tools you can place them on any tablet and then place them around your house to control them.

There are many videos available today that will show you how to get started. This, but really creating a smart home control panel is an art form and having created these types of interfaces in industrial facilities, I can tell you that most of the tools available today make home control panels smart are a good method to monitor your home wherever you are. Where it falls down is how complex they end up in a large smart home, so it's best to create panels that fit a specific area of ​​your home and then place a tablet there the following way people control their smart homes and I think it ends up in a The layer under the dashboard of a smart home is through voice control.

The nice thing about voice control is that it can bypass your modes and automations and will allow you to control those unique situations. It's also nice because you can start scenes and when you pair a voice assistant. to another smart home hub, then what you get is access to turn those modes on and off if you've organized things correctly. The truth is that voice assistants also contain routines or automation options, but they are generally much simpler than a full smart home hub and you can activate those routines by voice. The other important thing about voice assistance is that your smart home hub will probably be able to integrate with them, but what you need to keep in mind is that your hub will send information to the voice assistant and you won't.

It has a lot of information traveling back to the center. What I mean by this is that the devices you bring into your facility will appear and be controllable in the voice assistant app and then obviously be able to execute by voice what you will experience if you integrate a product. directly with the voice assistant is that it will not appear in your device list on your hub. Now there are solutions like the virtual switches or devices I just talked about that would allow you to control up and down from the voice assistant, but it has to be done carefully, so while those voice assistant apps are the app or top-level hub in your home, you can usually find ways around it because they are simpler devices, buttons or even switches are the next layer down from voice assistants.

It doesn't make them any less useful and in fact I think in many cases these can be some of the most useful devices in a smart home, they are just simpler, there are buttons and switches that give you a lot of options to integrate with different hubs and with different smart home platforms so they can do a lot and the really great thing about these types of devices is that they can be placed anywhere in your home. Brian is a magician and so are you, so they can be anything from relocating a light. switch or a duplication of a light switch all the way, in the case of something like buttons, from quick starting multiple routines, multiple automations or scenes in multiple centers, that means they can be a great way to start anything in your smart home, but they are. physical interaction device and, finally, the very applications that vendors create or that your smart home hub has, become a way to control your smart home.

This might be more convenient thancreate automations for push buttons or create a smart home control panel or use voice. assistant, but you generally have very little control over how an app is presented and then you have to live with that phone or tablet around you and then find the app. I think the best part of apps are widgets that give you specific control. that you use regularly in your home, it gives you a little button on the home page or on your phone screen that you can press and then the question of whether you can use multiple hubs is simple to answer, but the impacts All of those answers are complicated , so the short answer is yes, you can use multiple hubs and you can also use multiple smart speakers from multiple companies and you can place them all over your home with different tasks or different parts of your life in mind.

Now let's get started. Why you might choose to have multiple smart home hubs, there are great examples of specialized smart home hubs that work with only a subset of device types. What I mean is that when you look at the lutron cassetta system, it's really about controlling smart lights and blinds. and curtains in your home, but it doesn't do anything else, those products require the Lutron hub and actually use a 433 megahertz carrier frequency to go between the hub and the products, which means there is no other hub you can use to connect to your light switches and fan controllers so it gets stuck.

There are many other examples of this today including Acara Phillips, utuya and I'm sure there are many more that I'm forgetting. These are what I would call secondary hubs that allow you to automate with those products. Only all of them have some ability to create automations in their application, but in general you will only be able to automate with the products that that company produces within their application, so what happens in these centers is often at a lower layer than the major. hub or your main controller app, you basically end up feeding devices and potentially some scenes to your general hubs app and then you have that general or main hub controlling it through all of its functions.

Now there are drawbacks to doing this because sometimes you lose features when you choose the wrong main hub and a great example of this is that switchbot doesn't have amazing integration with smartthings, you can't use all the features of the smartthings app that you can in the app switchbot, so this is again a point to stop and investigate how that integration is going and how it works. The other thing to consider when using multiple smart home hubs like this is that each of those integrations between hubs tends to be cloud-based, so let's go back to our example of the motion sensor and smart bulb connected to our hub For smart home, let's say our hub is able to connect the motion sensor to the hub directly and in this case locally, that means any automation using that motion sensor would be fast and very reliable. would not require the internet to report that it sees motion in our previous version of this example, we said that the bulb was also connected to our hub, if this was the case then all communication happens between the bulb and the hub and the motion sensor and the hub, however, let's say for a moment that we buy a smart bulb that doesn't connect directly to our existing hub now so that the motion sensor turns on the bulb, the two hubs have to communicate now, there are a few ways for this to happen and depending on the two hubs we were talking about, this could work differently.

What I mean by this is that the communication could be two-way, which would mean the state of the motion sensor and the state of the smart bulb. would be available on both hubs, the communication could be one-way, which would mean that the status of the smart bulb would have to be sent to our first hub, but that the state of the motion sensor would not be available on our second or our hub. newer, either way, information must be transmitted and automation must be created in one of the hubs to ensure that the smart bulb turns on when the motion sensor detects movement;

Unfortunately, today, in many cases, hubs do not. communicate directly together, this could change in the future and I think we will see that happen, but often what happens is that each center aggregates their data and then sends it to their respective cloud services and then when something changes, it is adds to the information in the cloud. service, then every hub that has been allowed to pull data from that cloud service will see that change and then be able to react. The other thing that has to happen in this case is that the cloud services have to exchange the information that hub1 wants hub 2 to provide. change the state of the smart bulb, then what happens in this example is that the motion sensor sees movement and then sends it locally to the first hub, which is very fast, that hub recognizes that an automation has been created and then so that automation works. they have to send the command to the cloud service for the second center;

Sending the command obviously requires the Internet to be available and that signal has to travel through some part of the world; there are time delays and there are reliability losses with that now That sounds pretty complicated and what will be even more fun for you is that then the state of the smart bulb is sent back that way through the cloud services and to your first smart home hub, which involves a lot of communication and a long distance. your signals could travel which again introduces a lot of delay and a lot of reliability losses, don't get me wrong there are other methods for signals like this to be transmitted between two hubs.

I've seen really good integration between philips hue with your hub and other smart home hubs or platforms in your home, a lot of those signals pass locally so it can be done directly between cloud services, they're not involved in the sending those commands, usually there are statuses that are still sent to the cloud services, but that's more to keep track of what's happening in your home and send those statuses to the other services connected to the cloud, there is another implication of having multiple hubs which is rarely talked about and can really frustrate you if I take all my Philips Hue lights. and I integrate them into my smart home hub and then I take that smart home hub and I integrate it with amazon google or apple then I take my philips hue equipment and I integrate it directly into amazon google or apple as well, what happens in this case?

Do I end up with duplicate devices in the Amazon, Google or Apple app? Now there are some hubs that allow you to choose which devices will ascend to that layer or integrate with those voice assistants, but if you don't have that option, then you have to decide whether or not you want to have mirrored devices or you don't want to integrate those secondary hubs like Philips Hue directly with voice assistant apps, not integrating a service directly can have drawbacks and Philips Hue is a great example of that, I see it today when I want to start a scene that I have created in the Philips Hue app.

I can choose a dynamic or static scene. The dynamics change color over time and this is a very used feature if I use the direct integration between Amazon and Philips Hue. I can choose a dynamic or static scene to run in my routines or really just when I'm controlling the scenes in the Amazon app. However, when I run this integration through most other hubs and then Amazon, I unfortunately lose that dynamic scene option. There's not a really good single answer for this, but there is good news on the horizon, as the next standard should make things a little more ubiquitous between your different hubs and your voice assistants.

We shouldn't see so many duplicates either. With Matte Ready products, the other option is to disable the devices in the Amazon app or just live with the fact that when you say turn on x bulb, the voice assistant will come back and tell you that it is turning on two bulbs in the section. about the multiple hubs we just completed and in the section on how to organize your smart home with a hub, I mentioned some best practices. I'll quickly summarize some of the most important ones and then give you some best practices. with your smart home hubs and then I'll tell you how to properly position your smart home hub and how it fits into your overall home in terms of best practices for organizing your automations and how to control your home, in that order. modes scenes automations or routines a dashboard voice control buttons or switches and finally the app uses the appropriate technology for the situation here are some examples that wi-fi is best for high bandwidth situations such as cameras, speakers and streaming devices zigbee is ideal for low cost sensors like these and for homes that have lighter construction materials, there are also many hubs and devices available for zigbee, so there tends to be many reasons to look at this technology from a market point of view .

A lower carrier frequency than ZigBee and Wi-Fi, meaning it works best in rooms like the boiler room, where there is a lot of metal and many reflective surfaces. It is also better in homes with thicker building materials and can reach further than zigbee or Wi-Fi Bluetooth is interesting because it is high bandwidth as is Wi-Fi, but there is also a low power version called ble that Can be used with sensors and other battery-powered devices. Bluetooth advocates say that even if your Wi-Fi isn't working, your phone can still communicate with your products, which is a nice benefit.

Lora is easily the longest-range wireless technology we'll talk about today, boasting a distance of a quarter mile. This is what smart cities are built on quite often and that tells you the level of reliability you can expect from this method of communication, there are not many options available for consumer electronics, although thread is the newest technology in this list and again, there are still not many options available for threaded products over time, the options will grow and thread has benefits over zigbee and z-wave in many ways, it reaches up to z-wave and will be interfered with less than zigbee, It also has as much bandwidth as Zigbee but has lower latency or time to respond compared to Zigbee and Z-Wave, especially as their networks get larger, today companies are discovering how to combine these technologies to take advantage Maximize your smart home hubs and the smart home networks you're building.

At home too, an example of this is called Amazon Sidewalk. You'll hear that Amazon is putting Sidewalk on many of its Echo speakers and many of the Ring products. Additionally, you'll start to hear about other manufacturers incorporating Amazon Sidewalk connectivity into their products now. This is the interesting thing about Sidewalk: it uses Lora for long range communication, it uses Bluetooth to configure the devices or when there is no Wi-Fi in your house, you can also use it and it uses Wi-Fi for general communication with your devices, so think . We think of it as the top layer that takes the benefits of these technologies and combines them into a specification for you or the device manufacturer to know.

Now something similar is happening in the industry with the creation of the subject standard. This new standard will take advantage of the benefits of wired wi-fi, bluetooth connectivity and even ethernet and use them in different combinations, some major devices will use wires and I think we will see an overwhelming amount of them being smaller or lower bandwidth sensors and products. bandwidth, while other hardware devices will use wi-fi or ethernet connectivity when they need that high bandwidth. I also think that companies will decide to use wi-fi when they want to make a cheaper version of a smart home product, but all this and all the discussion around these technologies and standards.

That is, each one will have different benefits and having your center have access to as many of them as possible is really beneficial. The next tip is that for any smart home hub you have, it is important to keep track of the automations you have maintained. Some people are fine with just looking at the list of automations, but I think it makes more sense to keep a large spreadsheet or workbook where you've placed the automations and their impact, no matter what hub you have. a set of community forums anda set of content creators like me who will create guides and keep you up to date on what you can do with those devices.

Get some resources and don't be afraid to engage in conversations about the center you want. If you are interested in using it or using it, and again, no matter what facility you have or are looking at, make sure you have access to their support system and that they will actually respond to you; You'll want to ask a lot of questions about what other products can do inside. your center or will have general questions about the features of your application. One of the other things that is a best practice with centers is to locate them correctly; However, this is a somewhat complex topic that we must delve into a little more.

I'm going to borrow a diagram I made for our previous video. It is best to start by talking about a modem that you normally get from your Internet service provider and a router that form the basis of your network and you may get a mesh Wi-Fi system. or multiple network switches to build that network around your home, from there you will connect a smart home hub either via Ethernet or via an Ethernet cable and of course you can have multiple of these hubs and place them throughout your home , however they are. A lot of thought goes into locating your smart home hubs, most of them physically fit anywhere due to their size and innocuous appearance; however, depending on the physical materials in your home, other sources of radiation or wireless signals, and the wireless technologies being used. used in the hub, you may only have a few places where you can put the hub and have it actually work properly.

Every wireless technology has a maximum distance it can travel, these are stated publicly and yet when you see the distances in this chart you will understand that those calculations are done outdoors and without sources of interference, there are no materials in your walls that interfere as is the case in your home now, the higher the carrier frequency of that technology, the more likely it is that your wall or other materials will affect the distance and even completely interfere with the signals. This is a great way to think about these wireless signals and this app only works with 2.4 gigahertz wi-fi, but you can see how wireless signals are reflected and refracted by different materials and surfaces in space in some cases, Depending on the material, those wireless signals could even be absorbed completely, each smart home hub will have its own set of radios and generally today they are created as omnidirectional antennas, the good news is that once you are within a few meters or at least a few feet away, radio signals must travel spherically;

However, within that short area around your hub, interference sources could be really harmful to those signals reaching your home and your devices when you place them. your zigbee device or hub next to a strong wifi source or a strong wifi signal that can create interference. I use apps like this one called wi-fi man on Android to find out the strength of my wifi near any of my devices, if I have problems I only troubleshoot if something is not working. Additionally, many of these other wireless standards have devices that can repeat or act as nodes in the mesh network in zigbee and z-wave networks, they will be called repeaters.

In threaded networks you will hear the term edge router or wi-fi router in mesh networks you call them mesh nodes it is actually the same idea that mesh node repeaters or edge routers can help you get around hotspots. interference or materials that do not. enables robust and reliable connectivity to a device; However, your hub may not give you the tools necessary to change the routing. These networks are what is called self-healing, so if something is not connected, the network will try to reconnect; however, you can also do this by removing a repeater. The network will eventually try to find a way around all of this to say that the best practice for getting and maintaining connections to devices connected to your hub is to make sure they are away from sources of interference and that they have strong signals nearby that allow them to stay connected. now.

I should say that some hubs will give you utilities to rebuild a network like a z-wave network so things are organized more efficiently or they may have diagnostic utilities that show you what routing is being done and how often something is done. . not being able to communicate with him, but this is not consistent at all centers and, in my opinion, should affect your decision. I have spoken several times in today's video about the matter. I told you that a matter controller is actually very similar to an intelligent. home hub and in fact it is just a new name for a hub, however there are some minor differences between matter controllers and smart home hubs and they will change the way hubs are perceived and how they are managed in your home , at least in some small ways.

I think the first and biggest change is that a matter controller is designed to allow you to switch very easily between it and other matter controllers when you think about a smart home hub and you think about connecting directly to it a number of products that tend to be difficult. or at least it takes a long time to move to another center. The important idea is that a feature called multi-admin allows you to move between centers seamlessly. This would suggest that the problem of duplicating devices would go away, but there are not a hundred of us.

Percent sure of that as I make this video, the other big change is that Matter is actually using a couple of those wireless technologies as well as Ethernet connectivity to achieve its goals, which means that when you have a Matter controller, it could contain some or all the technologies that are included in the Matter standard. Now I have already said that those technologies are wi-fi, ethernet, bluetooth and thread. Now, bluetooth is really just for setting up the device initially because you'll be using your phone and that will make the initial connection between those two to transmit data back. and further during the setup process from there, one or more Wi-Fi Ethernet and thread will be used to communicate with the device.

This means that you will again have to pay attention to the radios in your hub or matter. controller if you don't have a threaded matter controller then you won't be able to connect any thread device to your smart home network. Now, here is the problem with thread and wifi when we talk about products that are compatible with a device. could have thread but not be compatible and a device could be compatible but not have thread a device could have wi-fi but not be compatible and again the opposite could be true. I think what you'll see over time is that you'll end up with a lot of matter controllers in your home as they're located on more types of devices than the traditional hub we're familiar with.

A great example of this or that is that the matter controllers will be located in a nearby Samsung refrigerator. I suspect that in the future TV routers and many other appliances will have them too and really many electronic devices can get them now and that's the biggest change when you combine that idea with the fact that the multi-manager feature will allow you to make the transition between apps and platforms with relative ease, you'll find it easier to use each platform's unique features with all of your smart home products. This is, of course, the goal and we have to wait to see how manufacturers play within this type of system and how they try to create their own unique offerings that are better than their competitors.

There is a big additional change between thread and zigbee and z wave and Because it is included in the subject standard, this is a really important point to note with the introduction of thread 1.3, what has happened is that multiple edge routers or multiple thread controllers will be able to work together on a network single-threaded, which means that once you've paired your threading device with a threading network or a threading edge router, you won't have to worry about switching between threads. controllers and different applications why I say this is such a big difference vs zigbee and z-wave is because each of them requires you to unbind from the existing hub before using another controller, application or hub.

Now let me be clear, I'm not going to do it. To complete a full comparison of all of these smart home hubs, but I'll give you what I believe are 15 of the best smart home hubs available today and the specific benefits and radios they bring to your home, plus some of the inconveniences you may experience, let's get started. With a really simple one from a company called Fleck, this hub connects to your Bluetooth smart buds and connects to Ethernet to access your home network. The hub has an optional IR blaster meaning you can use the buttons to fire an IR signal at a non-smart electronic device in your home, the real power behind flick is that the buttons now connect to so many services and so many platforms that actually do it through the hub but it's an expensive system when you get down to it and it's really a great secondary hub that gives you button control now all your buttons get three different styles of clicks and that connectivity to so many platforms plus the feature of being able to make a single click reach all those platforms at the same time makes it a true aggregator of your smart home with the push of a button. switchbot is a unique manufacturer of smart home products.

They started with their bot and became more innovative from there, meaning they have truly unique offerings and almost all of their products. Connect via Bluetooth to your hubs. They now have some Wi-Fi connected products these days, but to get real automation features within your app, you'll need the mini hub. You can have several mini hubs in your home to cover your entire house. with coverage because bluetooth doesn't necessarily reach far enough and I can tell you from experience that having multiple hubs is useful and doesn't cause you any extra problems, their automations are pretty good within their app and they even have options for things like NFC. tags to start automation, the system continues to develop with new products several times a year and the mini hub acts as one of the best infrared emitters on the market today due to its ability to program any button on your remote control into the hub.

The downsides to Switchbot are that most of its automations and connections to other products or other platforms run in the cloud, so while you can always open the app and connect to your devices via Bluetooth, your automations usually require Internet to function. The other drawback is the lack. of a direct integration with Apple Homekit at the moment and when I look at the Samsung Smartthings integration I feel like it's pretty weak, but Switchbot has great integration with Amazon and Google, plus some integration with Home Assistant. One of Switchbot's biggest competitors is Akara. Akara has a number. of different hubs that they sell and they are actually also really innovative because their hubs are sometimes contained within the cameras that they sell.

Acara's hubs use zigbee at the moment, but there are signs of updates to their hubs when the standard in question comes out, we're also starting to see versions of their products that use threading, which will be a welcome update over time, plus, many of their hubs have that ir blaster that can be customized and their app and overall platform works very well with apple homekit and becomes one. One of the most useful ways to automate your home if you want to use Apple's home automation system, the one thing that always impresses me about Acara is how their devices always have some unique features within their app.

A great example of this is the new e1 curtains which have a mode that allows you to move them slowly over a period of time. They also support gestures on some of their camera hubs, meaning you can start a routine using your hand in front of the camera. In fact, I debuted this smart home system. on youtube or at least I think so and this system is the only one I know of right now that has lora as a communication technology, at least for smart homes, it's hard to find worldwide and I don't even think it's licensed for frequency radio for everyone, but if you can get link products and your center, then you have somereally interesting properties because it uses lora, all the components can communicate up to a quarter mile away from this center, there are all kinds of unique devices. in the system as well, they have also focused a lot on home security and leak detection and prevention, so they have real use cases in their home that go far beyond lighting, which they actually have problems when you create automations, the application is fine, but they are quite limited in their complexity and they also have to use a cloud connection to run those automations nowadays, the really interesting thing about this system is that if you only buy a couple of components , say a leak sensor and one of its valves. actuators, then you can pair those two directly, you wouldn't have any app control unless you go for the hub, but pairing those two directly means that when the leak sensor detects a leak, the valve in your home will automatically close and that It will happen without Internet required and actually no hub required.

The other criticism of this system is that because it uses lora and because there is no real plan to integrate that technology with the subject standard, we could see this product from the outside looking in or, at best , to the enterprise. discovering how to make its center a bridge to matter networks, but there is no information about it yet. I said my link had lighting issues and that's where the next two hubs really succeed. Philips hue relies almost entirely on light as a system, although they do. I have a set of motion sensors and a couple of things like smart plugs and wireless switches, the whole system really relies on lighting and communicates via zigbee with your hub or via bluetooth with your phone.

Now, this is a true secondary hub, although today and I say that because Philips Hue connects to almost all the other platforms and hubs that we are talking about today, the amazing thing about that connectivity is that in many cases it is done locally inside your home and that means commands and automations run on other systems. Find the Philips Hue and your lighting almost immediately, the Hue Hub itself has a limitation on the number of devices that can connect to it, so in some cases you could end up running a few if you dig too deep into the Hue system.

There are some minor automations you can run in this hub, but generally all you're going to do is create scenes and some time- or location-based automations and then run real, deep automations in another hub. We could see this in reality. start changing with matter, which means that Philips Hue owners came out and said that their center will receive a matter upgrade and that could give this company the boost it needed to start creating deeper automation options in its application. The other lighting focused center is Lutron they have light switches and switches that work with your fan and because they are Lutron they are very good at doing it electrically in your home.

Now your hub uses 433 megahertz radio signals to communicate with the different components and they even have smart features. plugs that can dim a lamp in your home, their switches and controllers also let you control blinds and curtains, so they are a true complete home lighting solution, but they don't have many of those other types of smart home devices that you they will want to, so they end up being a secondary hub now that their reliability is extremely high and I think that is due to the use of 433 megahertz rf to control their products because that is not interfered with by much.

Your application is reasonable, but I wouldn't do it. Call it mind-blowing and so far I don't have any information on how they create matter compatibility within their hub. They couldn't make any of their end devices, so the switches couldn't be supported due to frequency. is being used, but they could look at that hub that connects via Ethernet to their network. A really interesting offering is athems homie and I would say this is the first true smart home primary hub we are talking about on this list. What's interesting homie is that you can just download the app and plug five products into it and start creating what they call flows which are actually automations, but it's a pretty interesting system to do it, after that you can get a home bridge or you can pay four dollars. a month to get more connections with homie premium, you can also upgrade to homie pro which has almost all the radios and connection technologies you want, plus it does pretty much everything locally, the more I look at this system the more I like it.

The development and the different features it has, in addition to compatibility, continue to expand. I think the big drawback is that you'll probably end up on a subscription service with this hub and it doesn't seem to have a radio thread either, although you might reveal that to us when the thing is published, another really serious major smart home hub is Home Seer. Now I think this company has been around for about 20 years at this point and they have a lot of home automation devices that you can buy and even connect. For other systems, even the basic Homeseer hub costs 150 and the price goes up from there, plus you'll end up buying upgrades every few years for the software or firmware, compared to some of the other hubs we're talking about today.

There are not that many integrations, at least not free, and that is because many of the integrations or plugins that have been created will cost you money because they were billed by a developer who expected to make money from it, that is not a bad thing because the developers Se You have to pay them for their work, but I could catch you with this system, so it's a high cost for me, but despite that, it's a really complete home automation system that can do really deep automation and is highly reliable. . Google Assistant is the most capable voice assistant available today and comes on all Google Nest speakers and Google Nest Hub smart displays.

He also comes on many phones or at least ones running Android and gives you voice control for your smart home. Google has a pretty good Design for their app and they integrate with almost every type of product you want and every smart home hub you'll see. The problem with Google is that they have never allowed other smart home products to start their routine functions. They have stated that this will change when the standard in question comes out and they are actually ready from a physical hardware point of view for this standard, that is because many of their speakers already have a thread edge router and in fact, when you look at the origin of The Thread comes through the nest of the company that Google bought a long time ago, unfortunately, until Google activates all these routine features that allow us to start automations with one or more triggers, we won't know how to classify this as a smart home hub. because right now it really isn't and all you can do is start routines and run scenes by voice or at a scheduled time.

Apple has a number of hubs in its ecosystem and when you look at the Apple Homepod mini, it is a pretty capable hub when we talk about connecting wired and Wi-Fi products; However, to connect something to that hub, it must be certified to work with Apple Home. and that additional certification has always meant that there are fewer products available to connect to the homepod mini, as well as the other hubs. This actually means that most of your smart home costs more when it works this way and only. a big part of that is getting what's called a domestic bridge.

There are a few on the market today and I use the Starling Home Hub to install my Google Nest products on the Apple Homekit. There are also home bridges you can make with a Raspberry Pi. or you can buy something like hoobs which is a commercial version of home bridge, this will give you more options to add to Apple's home kit that are now low cost, as far as I know Apple is as prepared as any company for the next standard. and its Apple TV 4k is another hub with Wi-Fi and wired connectivity. Apple's Home app is quite capable, but the automation options you have for starting routines aren't really comprehensive and you don't really have multiple conditions that you can.

Use it there, so I would call this a mid-level automation option, but if you have Apple iPhones in your house that will use Apple Homekit, then Siri Shortcuts is an app that is available on your phone or iPad that actually works. opens. There are now many more options for deep automation within your phone and your home. One thing to keep in mind going forward is that some people were using an Apple iPad as the hub for their home kit system and unfortunately if you want to use that, the import standard or use that with the stuff standard, the ipad It won't be able to function as a hub to be honest, I had tried the iPad before it was a disaster anyway so it doesn't really matter, it's a battery powered hub that can run out. of batteries Amazon sells several Echo speakers and Echo Show smart displays and each has several hubs.

In most cases, you'll find that cheaper speakers only have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. You may also find that they contain a curbside hub which I explained also included lora now when you start getting to some of the larger speakers and smart displays you get more hub radios, the echo show 10 and the echo studio as well as some Older speakers have a zigbee hub. but the most capable hub right now is this 4th generation echo speaker. It has a zigbee hub, a bluetooth wi-fi sidewalk hub and when the standard is released your zigbee radio will have a dual purpose to include thread and yes that can happen if the company is smart enough to offer a lot of connectivity in a 100 speaker and although Amazon automations are never run locally, this is expected to start when the standard is released and I think it will be a common theme when we talk about everyone. these speakers from Google, Apple and Amazon, since this is one of the main aspects of the next standard, the idea is that the connectivity is local within your home network and that will always mean that the processing power is available in your center of smart home. or in this case a smart home speaker, then they should be able to run routines or automations on that device for some time now, Amazon has been preparing the right level of processing power and putting it in many of their speakers, but I think the echo The fourth generation is the epitome of this.

The other side of Amazon is Ring Now Ray, which includes a true smart home hub with smart home security and they have a line of sensors, lights and cameras that connect, plus their app also connects to a few other brands . That aside from purchasing official Ring products, the integrations aren't as powerful as you'll see at other hubs. That statement mostly applies when we're talking about z-wave devices, but the app is easy to navigate and because a lot of it is z-wave. Mind you, a lot of these things can happen in the hub, however, most of the products you'll use with Ring are camera-based products, like doorbells, and to get most of the security features and cloud recordings, you'll need a subscription;

There is a very good synergy between ring and amazon when purchased together as amazon guard plus works with ring professional security monitoring and many of the subscription plans are being combined between amazon and ring now so I love ring for people which are really linked to Amazon, but it is not such a complete and intelligent option. Home hub, as some might still expect, that security feature is a big plus. A while ago I tried a hub that you would call a tuya hub, which means that it integrates with what is called the smart life application and there are several hubs available. there you can buy for that application what I will tell you is that the hub that I bought here has bluetooth and zigbee radios and it did a pretty good job of connecting to those devices that were compatible with the smart life application and had those radios and certifications, the Automation options weren't really deep and I will tell you that the app itself doesn't have really deep automation options, but this is a good middle ground for people who just want to get started with something relatively inexpensive, the biggest problem for me.

However, I couldn't really integrate the products that were on this hub or that connected to this hub with many other systems. I might include them on Google and Amazon for voice control, but nothing else so far, so thisIt's pretty basic stuff, but again. So cheap it's fun to own, Ikea has been producing more and more smart home products and while their first hub didn't really hit the mark in terms of how well it worked and how many products it worked with the growth of this platform. continues and it's something I'm a little excited about - the new hub coming this year will bring connectivity to all of IKEA's older zigbee products and that's in addition to future compatibility with that hub, plus they'll get a new app and lots of new devices that are still showing up, all of this means that IKEA is about to pivot and become a true smart home hub with some really cheap accessories, so while this isn't quite ready, it's something we should keep watching. , let's move forward a little. more serious and talk about what I would call the three most complete hubs today or at least the ones I'm going to talk about now.

Habitat has had several versions of their hub that connect to many z-wave and zigbee devices. and they have a complete list of product compatibility, in case you want to take a look, there are not many products on that list and there are not many devices connected to the cloud because the whole point of Hubitat is that it does all its functions. local automation, the rules engine that exists in hubitat is actually very easy to use in a really complicated way. Another feature of hubitat is that it can use webcore for scripting which means you can create those really crazy automations and habitat comes with its own security monitor which means you can do home security with this hub and some sensors and others devices, plus the rules engine really means you can automate a lot of things.

There are some loopholes with this system and I think the biggest loophole is that the app is everything. It's pretty much run from a locally hosted website in the center, the interface there is really rudimentary and a lot of people have trouble understanding what they're doing there, but once you understand the interface it's pretty easy. Another big gap for me is that I don't see any cameras connected to the system, so it has to be done separately somehow. However, people who use Habitat love the depth of the automations and the local nature of the center. Sometimes users end up with a couple in their home to completely automate their life, but this is a great way to do it now, the home assistant is like Linux in many ways, everything you do is a little more difficult and you have to trust in the community to do some of the more advanced things in the early days of Linux that you had to load. do it on a computer you already had and today Home Assistant is very similar.

There are many options for taking the Home Assistant OS and loading it onto different computer systems, from Raspberry Pi boards with hard drives or flash memory to Windows PCs, nas hardware, and Today, the Home Assistant team has managed to put out a few packages of commercially available hubs to purchase general automations. Installation and configuration are not difficult things to do, it is not difficult to integrate third-party products into Home Assistant and it is not difficult to do the most basic things. Things, it's also the most flexible system we're talking about on this list today and they were actually one of the first platforms to show us how the stuff will work, so they're preparing for the new standard as much as possible. be controlled locally with the home assistant which means you shouldn't need the internet which he said ironically because many integrations require the cloud because that's how many companies integrate with other platforms so you have to buy, write and pay attention to What products are integrated. locally to keep that profit at your center despite all these advantages, there are a few things to consider before going down this path, the first is that at any moment you could run into a deep technical challenge and have to fight your way out, you must be ready to spend a lot of time troubleshooting scripts or generally figuring out the nuts and bolts of your smart home and how things really work on a deeper layer than any other hub I'm talking about today, too if you want bring your smart home. control with you outside your home, you'll need the Naboo Casa subscription, which also enables Google Assistant voice assistant web links and many other cloud-based features that most people will want in the end.

Now the main thing I look at when I see that Home Assistant is an open source project suitable for a company that wants to get a quick advantage in the game that could work for you if you are using the system, but it could also mean the end of everything . of that effort that you put in if this system is sold to a large company now, I don't know if that's possible, I don't know if that's going to happen, but it's something that I think could happen. Samsung bought SmartThings several years ago and have increasingly tried to incorporate that system into their entire range of Samsung products.

A few years ago, Samsung stopped manufacturing hardware for the SmartThings system, which worried a lot of people, but they replaced their hardware allowing other companies to actually manufacture it. the same team and have started to expand in terms of the number of manufacturers that can connect to their platform, in addition they have been at the forefront in the standard development of the matter, their system or application is really easy to use and, in fact, there is quite a bit of flexibility if you use all the features, automation scenes and even modes because they are something you can create there and you can also use sharp tools or action tiles to create those custom panels and even with sharp tools you can create rules with your system that acts like automation and smart things you have a feature called labs where Smartthings or Samsung are testing things and you can test it with them, sometimes those features become full features and sometimes they don't work well and disappear.

Now, in my opinion, Samsung leads in several ways and I really like their smart home monitor service, which is a true DIY option for smart home security. They have options to connect some security cameras. They have a lot of Samsung products built in. Also, they have been incorporating more options for life automation into their app and the other big thing that will happen is that your hub will end up in a lot more electronic devices that you bring into your home, if you buy anything Samsung in the next few years, you will . It will probably come with a Smartthings hub and you will be able to use their system.

This is the system I use in my house and I love most of it. However, the system has some drawbacks, the biggest of which is that Samsung has a few interruptions every time. year and because they are not fully local users they may lose access to their system Last week I couldn't access the app for most of the day but most of my automation still ran because Samsung has been working on This problem has been going on for a long time and I have created a system within their center called smartthings edge. Any edges are run or connected locally to the center so they go in the right direction.

The other problem I've run into is that the app limits the number of devices and automations you can have, but in reality you'll find that with most hubs it's just that most people don't reach those limits and there are a number of other hubs or smart home platforms you can use. I just haven't used any of the others. So I'd love for you to comment below about the system that you really love and that has been really helpful to you and that will help everyone else watching this video. For now, let's put this all together so you can go ahead and start automating. your life with hubs at the center of your smart home a hub can be anything from a small white or black box to a camera with a hub inside, a smart speaker or it can be something that is simply contained on your phone like an app.

The biggest differentiator you'll find between hubs is what they can connect to and whether those connections are made locally or through a cloud service, features for automations, and those targeted by features like home security or the ability to connect to cameras or even complete functions. in app stores like the Amazon Skill Store are important because they can extend the usefulness of your smart home forever; In the end, all hubs end up as an aggregator in your home and you can have multiple hubs, but you should plan to use them in layers. With secondary hubs sending information to your primary hub, you should try to keep the number of hubs in your home relatively low and you could experience device duplication on larger voice assistant apps or even your hubs if you manage this incorrectly.

The good news is that you can redo those integrations if you don't. Like, carefully choosing your primary or even secondary hubs is one of the most important decisions you can make in your smart home and will create many of the successes or failures you will have for now. I have a playlist that is on the screen of the The best advice I can give you for your smart home. These are the videos that will help you choose your hub or build a component of your smart home the right way, so check out that playlist if you're ready to continue your journey.

Otherwise, thanks for watching today and of course don't hate to automate