Wink Hub - for a buck starting 7/2 - post your experience

You were able to pair the Wink Hub to the ST hub as a secondary z-wave controller?
Was there an advantage to that or just the an idea to try it?

I got the Wink Hub as well with 2 of the GE Link lights, it was fairly easy to set up and include the Hue bulbs I had. I wasn’t able to look it up to anything else yet. The lights they didn’t have in stock, so they are shipping them to the store from another one, but I won’t get them for a week or so.

I’m going to pick up a GE link and see if I can get it to connect with the ST hub like some others have.

@thrash99er The GE link bulbs work great overall… maybe worth checking your HD store tomorrow as my local store is getting another 30 bulbs shipped to them tonight for stock tomorrow.

I’ve been on the fence about getting a “smart hub” for my house for awhile. I’ve already got about 10 TCP Connect bulbs in my house along with some Wemo switches. In my head, I have grand dreams of building out a home wide system with z-wave locks, etc. So, when I saw that I could get the Wink hub at Home Depot for $1, I bought a couple extra TCP bulbs and jumped at the chance.

I immediately understood why it was $1. I had to add and delete this damn thing FIVE TIMES before it would connect to my Wifi network. It would randomly stop showing up in the app. I also had problems adding in my TCP bulbs. Once they were added, each bulb showed up 2 or 3 times. Easy enough to fix, but a little time consuming and annoying when you have to delete 20+ items from the app.

Finally had everything set up so I decided to try out their geolocation “robot” of rules based engine. I set it up so that my living room and dining room lights would turn on when it sensed I was home. I tried this for three days and it never worked.

When I did use the Wink app to turn on the lights, it was very slow like others have mentioned. Anywhere between 3 to 10 seconds lag. Using the native TCP Wireless app results in instant control, so the delay was a bit annoying.

All of these headaches coupled with the fact that most current Z-wave based hardware won’t work with it pushed me over the edge and I purchased a ST hub today. Excited to get it set up and customized!

I hooked the Wink hub up just to poke around and see if it could do anything useful for me. I noticed it had a “Copy” z-wave option, so I figured I’d try joining to as a secondary controller. I received a warning that this feature is experimental. I did it purely to see if it would work. It seems to be unusably slow and unreliable currently.

I was really hoping that I could use the Wink hub to control my Hue with the Pico remote. It looks like it can currently just associate the remote with other Lutron devices and cannot use it as a generic button input. It also looks like the app talks to the Hue bridge directly, and the hub doesn’t know anything about Hue. You cannot create “Robots” that act on Hue bulbs.

I also found it amusing that the Wink hub could see my z-wave and Hue devices, but not the GE Link bulbs that I bought with it. They are paired to my SmartThings hub. Does anyone know if Zigbee has provisions for multiple controllers similar to z-wave?

I purchased two along with 5 of the GE Bulbs and figured I could sell the hubs when my SmartThings Hub comes in. Initially, it gave me some problems because I didn’t realize my phone and the hub were on separate wifi networks. There was a major 5-10 sec delay from the app to dimming/powering lights. I reset the hub, updated the firmware and connected both the same network and the lights, groupings and automated tasks repopulated automatically. Now it has been working flawlessly for a few days now. I have a wakeup task that slowly brightens the lighting over a 15min period to wake us up in the morning. It’s proved to make an excellent alarm clock. I use my fitbit whenever we need to wake up at different times. I also have a few tasks at night that start dimming and turning off lights as it is time for bed. I can see this helping us not stay up so late. We live in a studio apartment, so it is easy for one of us to stay up doing something and causing the other to miss out on some sleep. Nevertheless, the wink hub looks pretty basic and doesn’t do nearly enough. I’ll be selling both once Smart Things is configured correctly and I can make sure they work perfectly with it.

[quote=“jonallsebrook, post:86, topic:3124”]
I am no UI expert but I feel that there are sometimes too many hoops to jump through to reach a control of a device. Primarily my wife wants to turn lights on and off and especially change a Hue Scene or the individual colors of the bulbs. The wink App has a single panel listing all the lights on the system with a slider for brightness and a long press for the color change on Hues. [/quote]

I agree with this sentiment. While I understand the focus on automation and using the ST app to setup automation, I miss the functionality of the free [AutHomation][1] app for my Vera. I enjoyed being able to easily swipe out the left drawer and change rooms, view my devices and make quick adjustments to them (eg. my thermostat from the comfort of my bed).

More than that, I really miss Tasker integration and Widgets. Being able to say “Okay Google, Lights Out” or tap a widget from my home screen was really convenient!

[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.garrettpower.authomationhd

I agree i wish smart things had better UI like AutHomation.

They should also work on voice commands that is the only thing i miss. Its would be nice to just unlock my phone and say Okay google Movie Scene - lights dim and XBMC would start playing… just a thought. The slider for the AC Sucks many times it will go past the temp i want and then i have to try like 5 times to get it right. A up and down arrow would be better in my opinion or just faster response to the slider action.

@michaelalden

Try Todd’s better thermostat device:

1 Like

After using my Wink Hub successfully for a few months and then having it suddenly become unusable this past week I’m now trying to figure out what to do next. I’m sick of this thing, sick of dealing with Wink support (as excellent as it is) and sick of not being able to trust that the hub is functioning. I need to find something that works in its place… Smartthings Hub perhaps? I thought about it before, but stayed with Wink. Now I want something that I can trust, use and enjoy. It must support both Zwave and Zigbee and be user friendly. Is Smartthings that hub? I’m going to do more reading and find out. So glad I only spent $1 on the hub because it’s going to end up in the closet.

My wink has gone back after couple of hours of use or non-use.

I am no expert but SmartThings has never failed me for what I have setup. The only issue that I have is occasional server lag. I am with ST thick and thin.

1 Like

I bought a Wink hub about 2 weeks ago as my first foray into Home Automation. Overall the software is maybe a little buggy, I had a couple of pairing issues but now it is working reasonably well. The problem I have though is with flexibility:

  • Hue Integration is basic. You can’t use Hue Lights with groups or robots (robots are the rules engine), All you can do is turn the lights on and off and change the color individually. The Hue App is a lot better but requires a hub which I ended up buying along with a couple of their controllers. So the Wink integration is irrelevant.

  • Lutron controller integration as has been mentioned is very limited. I bought a bunch of Pico controlers to use as switches all over my house but the switches can only control other Lutron devices and can’t be used directly as input for robots. I did manage to use a robot based on a Lutron light to trigger other lights so I can use a remote to turn of all lights upstairs and downstairs, but for more control I need to buy a bunch more Lutron dimmers and they are expensive. One upside is that you can at least group and control the lutron lights from the App.

  • IFTTT support is almost non existent for the hub. You can control Quirky power strips and accept inputs form the Spotter but that is all.

  • The Quirky spotter works fine for me but is a little pointless. Motion detection worked OK but the light sensor only detects changes in light levels and doesn’t give any kind of absolute value that you could trigger say some lights from.

  • To turn my lights on when it gets dark I needed to resort to a script that generated Google Calendar entries an hour offset from sunrise and sunse then use IFTTT to trigger a quirky power strip and then use a Robot to turn on the other devices

  • No community anywhere (at least that I could find), no shared experiences so I had to find all of the limitations out the hard way. After just a few minutes on the ST forums I see the community is streets ahead, and it seems very helpful and knowledgeable.

After 2 weeks I have the basics working (physically switchable scene for all my downstairs lights, and automatic lights at sunset) but the route I took was convoluted and inflexible. I don’t think that Home Automation is about turning lights on with your phone - in many cases that is harder than actually hitting a light switch so I want physical controllers and physical scene switches. I don’t see how to do that easily and elegantly using Wink.

I started to look at alternatives and found ST - as a programmer I am excited at the notion of Smart Apps and being able to program this stuff myself (although it looks like a lot of the things I want to do have already been done). The openness of the platform is awesome (lets hope it stays that way) and I am hopeful that my ST hub (being delivered today) will be able to get me to where I want to be in a smooth and elegant way!

1 Like

Welcome. The open platform is here to stay. Glad you are excited about SmartApps. The tools we provide for authoring them are being improved as I type this. As you get into it if you have suggestions, please post them here:

2 Likes

Thanks Ben -

Took my first steps today and have to say I am impressed. After cobbling a system together on the Wink that Kinda worked but felt like duct tape and bailing wire, I did the same thing with Smart Things in a fraction of the time using default menus and actions everywhere, everything just worked, and a lot more easily and quickly than Wink. I particularly like that the latest ST app focuses on the automation aspects whereas Wink is a basic things view with some additional features that flow from that like Robots, but there are so many restrictions, that even the easiest things seem complex. I guess a lot of this is down to maturity of the ST platform and software, but I am sticking here!

Wink hub is now unplugged and stored away on the off-chance they ever improve on it.

Wink Hub and App was on the today show today. Complete fail. I’m sure a you tube clip will surface at some point. pretty funny - except that I have the same experience with my ST whenever I try to show it off. lol

I couldn’t even setup the wink hub. Returned it to home depot couple of months back and they simply threw that stuff on a return cart at the customer service/return counter. :wink:

At least Wink app gets regular updates. Twice a month actually. ST app has not been updated for two month now, as if there’s nothing wrong with it. :smile:

2 Likes

@geko yeah, the last few updates for Wink have really improved it. It still isn’t as flexible as ST, and not as powerful. I don’t use it as much, so I don’t know about the reliability compared to ST. I do like the change they made a month or two ago adding the robots, a decent start to a rule building system to control things.

I don’t use Wink regularly, but I got it as an alternative after ST recent performance issues.

You “ST Hater” ! heheheeheh!

Same here. I keep an eye on it and keep it around “just in case”.

1 Like