Yeah Home Depot App now saying September for the bulb kit. Just saw this tweeted and looks representative of what Home Depot will carry on launch. If so then doubt will get the wink hub for a $1 as nothing new there I don’t have or want!
Looks as if the wink app has poor rule building too but will see if I can justify spending $50 to play as it’s going to have to be out of this world to get me away from SmartThings!
Got Wink? I got mine at local HD on my way to work this morning. There were 4 Wink hubs on the shelf. One thing I can tell right away - its big, but designed to stand vertically, so it doesn’t take too much space. It’s probably better this way for all the antennae inside it as well. Will post first impressions later.
Not managed to buy one as even though HD said they had them all three stores around me decided they didn’t. Quite a bit of noise on social media about this as I don’t think HD were ready for the launch in many areas.
I have played with the new version of the App and it does allow control of certain devices without the hub such as Hue Bulbs but even though their control interface for the bulbs is nice (a great implementation of long press to bring up a color picker) it doesn’t seem to want me to control it via what they call ‘robots’ their version of rules.
I am also hearing from people who have them that there is limited integration with ZWave i.e no GE control of dimmers/switches (surprising considering GE is a major backer of Quirky).
One of my HD’s says they “think” they have some in, so I’ll be checking them out after I get off work.
My Home Depot sucks! After perusing the entire store (all end caps, The switches and outlets sections, the locks section, the light bulbs section, and the fixtures section), I failed to come across 1 single piece of HA gear.
Then before walking out, I was asked by a nice young fellow what I was looking for to which I replied “your home automation section”. He then directed me to a bunch of analog timer outlets and some outdoor lights with hardwired motion sensor/photocell.
Try Amazon, my store (34209) said on line only.
Both my stores had hubs, propane tank sensor, spotter, hue, and, tcp bulbs but not the GE Link bulbs! Darn the only one I was interested in fiddling with! One interesting note none of the store managers had any ideas about the social push behind these and didnt even have the endcaps 100% set up yet. So poor handling of the roll out in my area as well. Also is it me or are the bulbs only avalible in the starter pack on amazon?
Anyone have a link on Amazon? My searches are pulling up nada.
??? link above - do amazon search for wink hub
Thanks. Have no interest in the hub as I “think” the bulbs will be compatible with the Hue bridge out of the box. Last week I preordered half a dozen, currently slated for late August shipping.
We’ll see when they get here.
Wink Hub teardown is here:
http://statusbits.blogspot.com/2014/07/wink-hub-teardown.html
In a nutshell, it’s powered by Freescase i.MX283 SoC (450 MHz ARM9 core), apparently running Linux. Pretty awesome power for $50 bucks!
Reviews are not good; seems they still have a lot of work to do.
Actually, reviews aren’t bad for a product that was released just yesterday. I haven’t seen a single negative review so far. If you have, please share a link. Most reviewers, take ‘let’s wait and see’ stance. For example:
Folks are having issues with Z-Wave devices (possibly only Z-Wave Plus devices being supported).
Wink uses newer (5th generation) Z-Wave chip - SD3502, comparing to ST’s ZM4101 (4th generation) module. “Z-Wave Plus” is just a new branding/certification program. There’s no difference in communication protocol.
Well then I can’t explain why folks are reporting problems pairing with Z-Wave devices.
Check out the amazon link a few posts up. 2.5 star rating as of tonight at ~8:30pm.
Complaints about the hub not pairing z-wave devices and other issues.
Yeah, Wink got three 1-star rating and SmartThings got six. So what? Seven reviews is not big enough sample set to make a conclusion. Software issues can be patched. It’s much harder to dig yourself out of the hole when you under-engineer your hardware like ST did, unfortunately.
