Aurora Lighting Hub Alternative

Devices & Integrations Connected Things
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Hi
We have the aurora lighting hub which has now been discontinued and we are looking at alternatives.
We have kinetic switches which I think narrows down what we could use - but I was hoping someone might be able to suggest what we could swap to?
Thanks in advance

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As you noted, there are very few Zigbee hubs which can handle the “Zigbee green energy” (kinetic) devices. And unfortunately, none of the smartthings/aeotec models. It’s too bad, because it’s really cool technology.

There are two possibilities you can research.

First, it’s possible they might work with a Hue bridge, although I’m not sure on that one. If they do, that will be by far the easiest solution. The Hue Bridge definitely supports some Zigbee Green profile (ZGP) devices, that’s what the “friends of Hue“ switches are, but it may be only specific brands/models. So I would buy a Hue bridge from somewhere with a good returns policy and give it a try.

If that doesn’t work, a second possibility, which definitely works for some features, but which is quite technical and can be challenging to set up, is to use home assistant with zigbee2mqtt. Here’s a discussion thread on that option. And you’ll be able to see that some people do have the Aurora A1 kinetic switches working with that platform. But home assistant itself is much more technical to work with than SmartThings or the Aurora native platform and then there is more complexity on top of that to be able to bring in the ZGP devices. So I don’t know if you even want to go down that path, but it is an option.

There are lots of resources on the Internet for getting started with home assistant. That’s open source, but is still essentially a competing brand to SmartThings so I don’t know that we can help you much here. But you should be able to find other forums that discuss home assistant pretty easily.

Good luck! I was sorry to see Aurora go into receivership, they definitely had some nice devices.

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Hi - thankyou so much for getting back to me and for such a detailed response. That’s great and I really appreciate the support :slightly_smiling_face:

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