Greetings!! Looking for some help here. If it’s ok, I’ll give some quick background…
I own 25 Sengled Zigbee multicolor lamps. Now that Sengled has vanished, my Sengled hub is a paperweight, and I find myself looking for a new hub to control my lamps. I tried the Hubitat Elevation first, but after fighting that for a few days, Hubitat support finally told me that using it over wifi is really not the best use, and suggested I hard-wire Ethernet to the hub. This is not an option for me, I must use wifi. (The old Sengled hub accomplished this like a breeze. The Hubitat just would not connect to my wifi)
The hub itself must have a decent range, as 17 of my lamps are outdoor perimeter soffit lights (one-story house), and the other 8 are throughout the inside of the house. I had the Sengled hub inside as centrally located as possible to all the outside lights, and it worked for the most part (although the farthest light sometimes wouldn’t respond). I’m guessing the distance from the Sengled hub to the farthest light was maybe 40’, and this was also going through the wall of the house and still worked.
So, here I am, a man with lots of smart lights and no way to control them. I’ve poked around and found some links to things such as Homey, Alexa Echo (I have two Alexas at home, one small puck and one taller, I’ve read these things might have hubs built-in, but don’t know if they’d have the signal strength I need).
there is an app for sengled App, so Homey does support (some off) these devices. If you recognize your lamps here it should work with Homey. The distance also depends on walls/materials in between.
Although there’s obviously much more to consider when buying a hub
like this … …
The bridge is just piece of hardware, and can be bought as unusable solo item.
It’s only of any use together with
Homey Cloud (the subscription model): bridge adds several local protocols like zigbee to the cloud connection, BUT local wifi devices can’t connect;
no internet > no Homey
Homey Pro 2023: bridge can be used as local satellite for bridging available protocols, except for zigbee+z-wave (acts as ordinary router)
Bridge needs internet when powering on
Pro needs internet on a regular basis, to check your authentication & sync time
Homey Pro Mini (USA & Canada): a bit like how it extends Homey Cloud, the bridge adds several protocols to the few onboard protocols.
Pro mini needs internet on a regular basis, to check your authentication & sync time (because it shares it’s firmware with Pro 2023).
It’s hard to advice, it depends on what you like to be able to do (and what you don’t need).
Homey Cloud is really limited, check the app store, to me it’s sort of a try-out / demo Homey.
The Homey Pro Mini + Homey bridge = sort of Pro 2023 with half the amount of memory (1GB)
The amount of memory roughly limits the number of apps you can install and run.
Appreciate the insight. I’m leaning toward just diving in and getting the full Pro, even though right now I’m only looking to control a few lights around the house. I’m sure I’ll want to add things down the road. Cheers.
