Following on from my previous post about not wanting to get the Philips Hue hub, I bought an Osram Lightify hub. Well, that was a mistake and a bit of a waste of time.
To keep this post simple there was one major issue I was struggling with: Range. The Lightify hub just does not have the range to see bulbs from one side of my house to the other – it even struggled to connect to lights in the next room sometimes. It would work to turn the light on then wouldn’t be able to turn it off later. This was a big disappointment as I had already spent some time working with their API to build my own rules etc. That hub is now sitting on a shelf never to be used again.
I got a Philips Hue hub, but I didn’t pay £50 for it. A colleague at work had a few spare so I bought one from him for £10. It is slightly annoying that this hub needs power and an ethernet connection (that was one nice thing about the Lightify hub only needing to be plugged in to a power socket) – maybe this is what makes its range better as I am now not having any range issues. Setting it up was easy and it can see all my bulbs, even the none Hue bulbs with no issues. The app also has sunset on/off settings right out of the box so the code I wrote to add the functionality to the Lightify hub is not needed anymore.
I do need to carry on with building my own gate sensor……