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by undecisive 2502 days ago
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...

2 comments

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.
> 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.