Samsung will shut down the v1 SmartThings hub this month

A featureless, white electronic device.

Enlarge / The v1 SmartThings Hub from 2013. It is dying on the finish of the month. (credit score: Samsung)

Samsung has spent the final yr or so upending its SmartThings ecosystem. SmartThings was born as an unbiased firm in 2012 when it launched one of many largest Kickstarter campaigns ever: a $1.2 million funding program for the corporate’s first sensible house hub. Samsung purchased SmartThings in 2014, and in June 2020, the Korean big introduced a plan that might mainly shut down all of that acquired stuff, forcing everybody over to in-house Samsung infrastructure. An enormous a part of that plan is occurring on the finish of the month, when Samsung will kill the first-generation SmartThings Hub.

The SmartThings Hub is mainly a Wi-Fi entry level—however in your sensible house stuff as an alternative of your telephones and laptops. As an alternative of Wi-Fi, SmartThings is the entry level for a Zigbee and Z-Wave community, two extremely low-power mesh networks utilized by sensible house gadgets. Wi-Fi is nice for loading webpages and movies, however it’s excessive overkill for one thing like a lightweight swap or door sensor, which simply must ship a couple of bits for “on or off” or “open or closed.” Zigbee and Z-Wave are so low-power which you could run these gadgets on AA or coin cell batteries for months. The Hub linked your sensible house community to the Web, providing you with entry to a management app and connecting to different companies like your favourite voice assistant.

You may think that killing the outdated hub may very well be seen as a ploy to promote extra {hardware}, however Samsung—a {hardware} firm—is definitely not interested by making SmartThings {hardware}. The corporate handed off hub manufacturing for the newest “SmartThings Hub (v3)” to German Web-of-things firm Aeotec. The brand new hub is generally $125, however Samsung has been beneficiant sufficient to supply present customers a dirt-cheat $35 improve value.

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