Hubspace 4+

I’m excited about this app since the UI of controlling my Alexa suite of smart home devices is a huge pain right now unless we talk to her continually. Also, since I’m the “IT person” for my family and their houses and being at my boyfriend’s home a lot, I like that I can easily switch between home locations.

My IOT home goal would be reducing consumption and increasing security using smart devices, day timing, motion detection for lights, a wall mounted tablet “master remote”, echo & dots, and a central app, I could create a smart home environment that I know how to intuitively control, responds to the time of day and motion in the room, and that our non-tech-savvy nanny and even the kids can use. Right now, we have a lot of devices without a central UI (Alexa’s voice control being the only unifying system). I’ve used pretty much every hub and smart home platform on the market and have even tried to build what we need. I will let you know how it goes.

I had bought 13 lights from Home Depot (Brand: Commercial Electric) about a year and half ago and to put it plainly, it was a horrible product. Lights would unsung all the time, they didn’t work properly and the app designed for them was terrible. After a year and half I called customer support for Home Depot and warrantied the product and sent me new lights. This time the app for them was Hubspace. I am soooo happy with this product. The app is easy to use, it looks nice, I can set schedules for my lights. Several people can have the same account on their phones. Truly night and day from the previous product. I am surprised there are not more reviews on this.

I purchased a 12v transformer for outdoor lighting from The Home Depot and after doing the install of the hardware had difficulties getting the app to connect to the transformer. Scanning the barcode failed 3 times then finally it connected.
I set up a schedule to turn the lights on at sunset and turn them off at sunrise. The lights did not turn on, the app showed the schedule was active but it would not turn.
After doing a hard reset I went through the process of set up and creating the schedule again. This failed again. Except the lights turned on at 0913 and back off at 0945 on their own.
I did a hard reset again this time choosing an actual time everyday to turn on the lights. This worked, lights came on at 1630 following the schedule. Time to turn off was the added and this also worked.
So, being curious I deleted the schedule and setup a schedule to turn on at Sunset and off at sunrise everyday. This schedule failed again.
I reverted back to the fixed time schedule and this worked again.

I have to assume the app does not know when sunrise and sunset times are either because it does not get geographical information from the iPhone or the app can’t actually do this, or possibly the cloud based server running the program is not correctly programmed.

Other than that annoying error the app seems to work fine as long as the hardware stays connected to the internet all the time with a strong signal for the schedule to function properly.