I love the SmartThings platform. I feel it’s about time we start to talk about the next version of the hub. When you think about it the Home Automation industry makes it extremely easy to “jump ship”. The reliability, technical support, GUI, device integration, etc. play a major role in sticking with the Smartthings hub or moving all of your devices to a new platform. I used another platform before switching to Smartthings. I won’t mention the name of my prior platform but it became very unstable, I was constantly looking for answers. Smartthings is awesome. They are brand new but look how far they came and how quickly they did so. I have ideas of features i would like to see in the next version of the hub and I’m sure together we could get a solid list going of ideas that would impove the hardware considerably.
** Check out the Home Center Lite hub. That’s a great looking device. Gives big hopes to what could be possible with SmartThings version 2.0. What do you think? **
More support for running offline. I know that somethings may be best handled with the help of a cloud, but we need the ability to keep things functioning without internet.
Other than bluetooth what else are you referring to? Now that Smartthings has a IFTTT channel there are numerous devices the lay person can tap into.
I would definitely like the next version of the hub to have a backup. Depending on what you have connected you will need to have something in place other than receiving a notification that the hub is offline.
I would also like to see on board memory.
Right now the majority of our events take place based upon a motion or open/close sensor. I think it is only a matter of time before voice integration will become mainstream. Perhaps a speaker/mic built into the.
It would be neat to have indicator lights on the hub in which the user can define. There are so many things that you could do with something that simple. Think about Hue Lights or Blink.
Would love to have a drag-n-drop, flow-like interface so that the hub and each thing would have their own icons with their attributes embedded within them. Once a new thing was certified by SmartThings to work with the platform, it would then be available as a new icon to use in the flow.
(Bonus: For consumers, I firmly believe this would drive new thing adoption. Once a person sees that new locks, sensors, or some other thing solution is available and would instantly/seamlessly integrate with their hub, a quick click would let them buy it and then quickly add it to a flow and then configure it once it arrived).
Example of a Flow and the “Time ROI”: We’re on RingCentral for telephony and it’s a configuration nightmare. Initial setup was nearly 30 hours a few years ago. It’s such a pain-in-the-arse to modify or add new hardware to that we basically…don’t.
So last month I did a test-before-switching with two other providers and the usual VoIP setup nightmare continued. While shorter, the setup time was still roughly 20+ hours each and required connecting with tech support several times. “Damn…looks like I’ll have to stay at RingCentral,” I thought.
Then a midsize company CTO buddy of mine told me about Telzio.com. Tried the demo, signed up, and created my first flow which you see below. The punchline? It took me 15 minutes to set up and test! I’ve since built two other flows for customer support and incoming sales queries and it took longer for me to think about the interaction flow I wanted then it took to build it.
THAT is the sort of interface I’ve longed for with SmartThings, especially as my home layout becomes more complex. Doing everything on my iPhone or iPad works, but I’d much rather build sophisticated interactions with a flow-chart-like metaphor similar to what Telzio delivers.
Any chance we’ll get a USB host port? The added cost is minimal (just a connector really) since all SoC’s have a built-in USB controller these days. But this would make the hub infinitely expandable and contribute to the Open Platform image the sets SmartThings apart from the rest.
What’s the upgrade prospects of the current Hub? I need to buy a few more, but depending on the upgrade prospects, I’d hold off one of them and use the one in my house currently there and buy the new one for my house.
I wouldn’t expect you to be able to upgrade the physical V1 hubs. Firmware alone won’t cut it as the processor and radios will be different. We are also unsure of any monetary incentive or program for upgrading but we are looking into some stuff like that.
We’re giving way more notice than most companies give. People can make their decisions on what value to get now and later. I would love to see a program where you can gift your V1 hub to friend or something and get a discount on a new v2 hub. But I am speaking as @ben and not as SmartThings right now.
