[r3bl]

> and no, sending a reset command via apps is not feasible (what if you've lost the account password and you've accidentally paired it to your neighbours wifi?)

Hubs save all the pain with smart lighting system. No need for an account, system works locally. If you wanna control them remotely, you can (but you don't have to). Connected to the wrong wifi? Reset a hub instead of individual bulbs. You pair bulbs with hubs and have just one device spamming traffic to your router.

Ikea and Philips Hue seem to be the only systems that got this solution down properly.

[undecisive]

I have a few problems with hubs; you need to store the physical thing somewhere, and as a house with difficulties in getting a wifi connection to corners, I can't guarantee that the coverage will be good enough before committing to a whole system. Then there's interoperability - I don't really want to be locked in to Phillips bulbs (though I'm sure some are a little more interoperable than others)

So I'm left thinking: I already have a wireless signal hitting most of the house, why complicate things? I'm not sure ability to reset is worth it...

[kchamplewski]

Note that the Philips system is a mesh network, so you communicate with the bulbs via WiFi/LAN to hit the hub, but the hub communicates via the mesh network, which lets it reliably reach distant bulbs out of WiFi range so long as there's a bulb chain it can bounce the signal along.

[josteink]

> I have a few problems with hubs; you need to store the physical thing somewhere, and as a house with difficulties in getting a wifi connection to corners

The hub only speaks WiFi to the app.

All the smart units (hub included) use Zigbee mesh-networking for cross device-communication, which is self-extending and only gets more reliable the more units you add.

At no point in time does IKEA or Hue bulbs depend on WiFi to function.