What Smart Home Hub options are available to use in NZ and what are you using?

Forums › Gadgets, robotics, home automation, electronics (including wearables) › What Smart Home Hub options are available to use in NZ and what are you using?

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billgates

4704 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#2220421 18-Apr-2019 09:46

I am using Hubitat. They support wide variety of countries frequencies and provide both Z-wave and zigbee USB dongles to plug into the controller along witht the right plug for NZ. All up incl USPS shipping it was under $250 delivered.

The thing that attracted me the most was that it is cloud independent and works 100% offline and the dev community and the dev community is very active and the founders did fair bit of work on SmartThings.

Do whatever you want to do man.

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mmeredith

4 posts

Wannabe Geek

#2248177 30-May-2019 08:46

I was in Melbourne last week, so I quickly arranged with RACV to collect another Samsung Smartthings kit (I had my first one shipped to Sydney, which I will collect this weekend). Great service from RACV.

Last night I setup the WiFi hub and a few sensors to play around with. From my very limited experience so far...

*Disclaimer: I am a smart home/automation/IT newbie so the following experiences are form that point of view, and there are likely way better ways around my tinkering.

The Good

WiFi coverage is far better than my ISP provided Huawei router.
Super easy to setup and runs the Plume platform for control and meshing (hence the idea to get 2 Smartthings kits)
Smartthings Automation has better trigger statements than IFTTT

The Bad

Signal only shows as 1 band so can be hard to connect "2.4GHz only" WiFi devices. It worked in the end, I may have done something wrong, but from my limited understanding it just sends out a signal and it decides what band & channel you are on.

The Ugly

Smartthings Automation only works with devices connected to the Zigbee and Zwave side of the hub. So triggering WiFi devices with Zigbee/Z-Wave sensors requires 3rd party customization.

The Solution

One can go the IFTTT route to get the Smartthings sensors to trigger WiFi devices.

One can use Virtual Switches created in the old Smartthings app, to link to the WiFi device (still need IFTTT), THEN automate in the Smartthings environment (which I prefer).

Once again, this is just my limited knowledge based on a few hours of tinkering.

Very keen to hear if anyone has any other experience linking Zigbee to WiFi devices or Smartthings tips & tricks, etc.

mmeredith

4 posts

Wannabe Geek

#2248184 30-May-2019 08:50

billgates:

I am using Hubitat. They support wide variety of countries frequencies and provide both Z-wave and zigbee USB dongles to plug into the controller along witht the right plug for NZ. All up incl USPS shipping it was under $250 delivered.

The thing that attracted me the most was that it is cloud independent and works 100% offline and the dev community and the dev community is very active and the founders did fair bit of work on SmartThings.

Nice! The Australasian Z-Wave issue really limits hub selection, it's nice to see a platform that thinks about that allows frequency flexibility to cater for all/most.

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