Hubs and Controllers
The "brains" of your home
You can choose to host the logic, the sensor processing, and the reactions and behavior of your home within the home itself or up in the cloud. While the cloud sounds like an easy and appealing solution to everything, hosting your home's "brains" in your own home is almost always better than relying on the internet and the cloud. The boxes, call them hubs or controllers, are easy to setup and cost little more than a few smart switches.
At this time, these are two best and most popular hubs to consider:
- SmartThings (on Amazon)
- Wink (on Amazon)
SmartThings is quick to install and setup, and the functionality is sufficient to bootstrap your home into the smart world within the hour (given a few peripheral devices of your choice). One of the most important features that it supports is lighting scenes. The app's UI is a little clumsy, and there’s only this mobile app access - no web or desktop app). We've also noticed on occasion that the status and commands aren’t always as reliable as they should be. This will improve as SmartThings has so far become the most popular and has wide product and community support.
Wink is also quick to install and setup, and also has functionality to bootstrap your home into the smart world quickly (with a few devices). It also supports lighting scenes. One of the biggest advantages of Wink is that it’s wireless so doesn’t have to be colocated with your router by an ethernet cable. Not only is wireless convenient, but it allows you to place the hub in a central place within your devices for better range and reliability.
Note for developers: SmartThings uses the Groovy language, which is a nice derivative of Java. Wink uses a web/http-based API.