SmartThings Hub Version 2.0

I agree a lot of people are likely to hold off on the V1 purchase, it’s just that’s not going to have a financial impact on Samsung one way or another. They didn’t buy SmartThings for its cash flow.

The question is whether those customers will buy something else they wouldn’t be willing to drop if ST V2 turns out to be great.

There’s no way to tell for sure, but I’d expect that as long as ST beats a real HomeKit alternative to market by a few months, and is a quality product, they should be fine.

My personal expectation is that there’s going to be almost no overlap in end devices between ST and HomeKit except for ZLL light bulbs operated through the Phillips Hue Bridge. So those with a heavy investment in either ecosystem will be much less likely to change. But right now there isn’t anything you can buy for HomeKit, so that fight hasn’t even started yet.

Every current inexpensive hub has some pluses and some minuses. I’m sure some people making a cheap hub purchase over the next few months will not choose ST, but I don’t think that’s going to keep them from looking at ST once V2 does arrive, especially if most of their devices will transfer. And the cheaper the competitor is now, the easier it will be to give up later.

We’ll see.

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Apple is a bad example… They could announce they are releasing an iPhone with the scent of dog shit and they would sell millions.

In this case here… They announced v2 so I didn’t want v1 when v2 is right around the corner now (specially at full price, if it was half off, I would have bought it)… But now I’m getting the vibe it will take a bit longer… So I’m not gonna wait around for the release. I got the staples hub for free, it doesn’t have the openness of smartthings that’s for sure but it supports all devices I want right now, has local processing, z-wave, zigbee, Bluetooth, wifi… If I’m not careful I might not look back. But I’m sure I will get drawn to v2 when it comes out unless it’s like $200

I’m holding off until V2 comes out, but I have been investigating and pricing what I will need once I get it.
My list is rather large and I will be buying groups of items together and expanding one room at a time to build my (mostly) z-wave network.

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Hey @Manofice- I have an unopened V1 hub I never installed… How does $75 sound, shipping included (as long as you don’t live somewhere crazy expensive to ship to)

@Bryan_Fleming that is very generous and maybe would have accepted if I didn’t already have the staples hub coming my way. Thanks though! I’m going to stick around and keep an eye on things though to see how/when v2 is.

@Bryan_Fleming Since @Manofice isn’t interested in it, if you’re still willing, I’d be interested in buying it from you at that price!

i volunteer as a tribute!!.. (for beta testing)

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Same here, I’d enjoy beta testing v2. Long time HA enthusiast here (since 2001) and I’ve got a nice sized setup to test all aspects of your new hub. I give good bug reports as well. ha.

TK

Not “if” … I’m pretty sure this is a design decision that is already made and locked in for various reasons.

I was responding to a post that asserted that this was due to a power draw just above 2A. I wasn’t sure if the rest of the rumor was based on that incorrect assumption. I don’t see it affecting my use of the product in the slightest…

Watch the Developer Discussions posted on youtube, they explained their decision to depart from the usb plug cause they were over 2A. Current usb 1.0 and 2.0 power specs are 0.5A and usb 3.0 is 0.9A, thus plugging V2 hub into a usb port may blow your pc port or standard chargers which are typically under 1A, yes most new phones and tabs use 2.1A chargers, but can cause problems when plugged into supplies/ports not rated that high. Very hard to read fine print on chargers to ensure power is high enough.

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With regards to USB power, the problem is more related to the fact that there are a lot of USB ports out there that won’t deliver more than 500ma and users don’t generally know the difference. As a result, somebody installs the hub next to their WiFi router, the router has a 500ma USB port so they plug it in there, and it works initially because the boot process might not be power intensive. Then when you light up both radios and it draws too much power, the line voltage sags (or cuts out), random things happen, and the user contacts support. The user has no way of knowing that this is a power problem and it becomes a pain to troubleshoot.

Switching to a barrel-type connector makes it so people won’t just go plug the hub into any random USB port. It forces the user to use the supplied plug which will for sure provide enough power. This is a pretty common design pattern in the manufacturing world known as “poka-yoke”, where you intentionally design restrictions to force correct user behavior.

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The plastics are almost final I believe. This particular one is currently installed at my house, having completely replaced my first generation hub.

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Did you hammer the AEBS 5th gen sideways by any chance, @tyler? :wink:

I just got a replacement hub today since my last one died and reseting and joining previous devices has been a nightmare, none will connect I hope that for version 2 of the hub there is a migration process

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@Tyler Any word on support for thread protocol? If supported can we expect Nest products to be compatable? Also, how did the transition from V1 to your new hub go? Any spoilers?

@Tyler What is the plan for the migrating profiles and things from Hub V.1 to Hub V.2?

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I haven’t heard anything specific about Thread yet. I’ve heard in the past that it would just be a software update.

It was a manual process, so super fun :smile:

The plan is to provide a tool to migrate everything over.

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My 1st gen Hub died and am stuck with a Dlink Staples Hub… Appreciate any ETA on the Hub 2 release date… thanks

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