SwitchBot has been talking about its new Hub 2 for months and it is finally here. An upgraded hub for its ecosystem of products that finally takes everything beyond just Bluetooth. The original Hub Mini was a great product as it also functioned as an IR blaster for your other devices, but the company clearly felt that wasn’t enough. If a hub is just going to sit there, it might as well be as helpful in as many other ways as possible.
Enter the SwitchBot Hub 2, a hub that still functions as an IR blaster for your other devices (TVs, Blu-ray players, fans, heaters, air purifiers, etc), while doing a host of other tasks as well. Including offering an LED display on the front that provides the temperature and humidity, while also measuring the light in the room throughout the day via the app thanks to also having a built-in light sensor (that can also be used to automatically adjust screen brightness as needed).
Not only that, but it offers two touch-sensitive buttons that turn the screen on and off that can also be configured to control your other devices instead. Turning these two buttons into smart buttons. Open/close your drapes, unlock the door, turn on the TV, etc. Or turn on or off multiple devices at the same time. All by attaching a scene to these buttons.
So the hub is more than just pulling its own weight around the house. It isn’t just there taking up space as it quietly links all of your SwitchBot devices together. It is providing you with useful information while allowing you to control various devices in the range of its IR blaster that wouldn’t normally be controllable otherwise.
Then you have support for Matter. The latest smart home standard that seeks to bring as many smart home ecosystems together as possible. Allowing users to integrate multiple brands without the need of multiple hubs or apps. At least, when it comes to having to control multiple hubs/apps after everything has been bridged together.
This doesn’t act as your main hub for all your other devices, so you still need a master hub that supports Matter, like Amazon Alexa, Google Nest, Apple HomePod Mini, SmartThings, or Home Assistant (with Matter-enabled USB device installed). This is required to help make it all work with this hub, as this hub simply acts as a bridge between your SwitchBot devices and your main Matter-enabled hub that is controlling all of your other devices.
By adding support for Matter, this now allows you to control your SwtichBot devices from other hubs as well as interact with other devices that support Matter. It allows support for Apple’s HomeKit and more.
At the moment, not all of SwitchBot’s products are Matter-ready, but the company is working on that. Currently, the SwitchBot Curtain and SwitchBot Blind Tilt products support the new Matter integration. Eventually, the company plans to extend Matter support to its other products. Which will allow the company to take a huge leap forward when it comes to competing against other brands.
Adding the hub to your main Matter setup (main hub) doesn’t take much. It offers a QR method for hubs that support this via their own apps, or a manual pairing mode. This is all it takes to bridge your hubs together and start using the benefits of this integration.
Between having a built-in IR blaster and Matter support, users have a lot of flexibility on how SwitchBot’s products interact with everything else. Let’s say the humidity sensor detects a certain level that is deemed by you to be too high. The IR blaster can then trigger your dehumidifier. If your dehumidifier doesn’t support IR but supports your main smart home hub, then you should be able to trigger it from there as long as the two hubs are bridged via Matter. Or via IFTTT, although this service is getting to be impossible for basic users to use without having to pay for it. As more ecosystems support Matter, services like IFTTT will be a thing of the past anyway, at least when it comes to the smart home.
Adding the Hub 2 to your SwitchBot app is easy. You trigger pairing on the front by holding down the front two buttons (that will eventually become your smart buttons for other devices if you chose to use them). Enter your Wi-Fi information and let it connect to your network. Give it a name and it will then show up in the app. From here, you can easily start adding other SwitchBot devices to the app and the hub will act as your bridge for all of them.
From the app, you can view the information from its sensors, including temperature, humidity, and light. You can start pairing your IR remotes with it so you can control nearby devices (within range of its IR blaster), as well as add functions to the two touch-sensitive buttons on the front.
It offers a number of settings, allowing you to control the screen’s brightness and elements, enable/disable its sounds, connect to cloud services (Google, Alexa, or IFTTT), pair NFC tags to it, update the firmware and more.
The only thing we could find wrong with it was its support for certain Wi-Fi networks. It is limited to 2.4GHz, which isn’t uncommon for smart home devices. However, it doesn’t seem to support any network that makes use of a passphrase in place of a password (aka, a password that contains spaces). So you cannot use spaces else it fails to connect every time. At least, this was our experience when trying multiple times before figuring that out. this is unfortunate for security purposes, but may be easily fixed with an update (something SwitchBot should seriously look into).
Also, when it comes to switching from Celsius to Fahrenheit, you have to do this from the main app settings and not the settings for the Hub/device itself. Which isn’t as obvious as we thought it would be as we were digging around the Hub settings looking for it for at least a hit minute before realizing it was in the app’s main settings instead. This didn’t affect the score any, but it was worth mentioning so others aren’t digging around looking for it.
Our Conclusion
This is an exciting hub for the company’s products. It shows the company is hard at work to make sure it is here to stay, even as the world moves towards new and more exciting smart home standards. Allowing its products to co-exist with so many others, making it much easier for users to build out their smart home with the products they like best.
When support for the SwitchBot locks reaches Matter-enabled status, this will likely result in a noticeable leap in the companies sales as its lock products are quite solid and incredibly user-friendly. And it all begins with this Hub that will eventually make it happen when/if that time comes.
Besides the lack for passphrases in Wi-Fi connectivity, the Hub 2 is very user-friendly once you have it configured the way you like it. From notifications to the ability to integrate (eventually) with just about any other Matter-enabled hub, to its IR blaster abilities, and more. This is a powerful hub solution that blows the original Hub Mini out of the water. Not that the Hub Mini isn’t out of date though as it still has a purpose for simply smart home setups that don’t need the extra power that the Hub 2 brings to the table.
I’m sure it will continue to get batter as the company continues to work on it through firmware updates to both it and its other products (as it continues to spread Matter support out).
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| Our Rating | Average Price* $69.99 |
*Average price is based on the time this article was published
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Additional Images:
Specifications:
- Material: ABS plastic, infrared transparent
- App: Android OS 5.0+, iOS 11.0+
- Operating Environment: Indoors
- Operating Temperature: ?20 C to 40 C
- Operating Humidity: 0 % to 90 % RH
- Input: 5 V ? 2 A
- BLE: 4.2
- Transmission Range: Max 120m (131.2 yd.) in open area
- Bluetooth Feature: Patent low energy BLE Mesh networking
- Wi-Fi: 802.11 b/g/n (2.4 GHz)
- Infrared Emission Range: Max 30 m (32.8 yd.)
- Infrared Receiving Range: Max 15 m (16.4 yd.)
- Third-party Integration: Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri Shortcuts, IFTTT
- Temperature Unit: Celcius, Fahrenheit
- Temperature and Humidity Sensor: Resolution: 0.1 C / 0.1 F, 1 % RH
- Temperature Range: ?20 C to 80 C (?4 F to 176 F)
- Humidity Range: 0 to 99 % RH
- Temperature Accuracy: ?20 C to 0 C (?4 F to 32 F) [+/- 0.4 C / 0.7 F]
- 0 C to 65 C (32 F to 149 F) [+/- 0.2 C / 0.4 F]
- 65 C to 80 C (149 F to 176 ) [+/- 0.3 C / 0.5 F]
- Humidity Accuracy: 0 to 10 % RH (+/- 4 % RH)
- 10 % to 90 % RH (+/- 2 % RH)
- 90 % to 99 % RH (+/- 4 % RH )
Are you a manufacturer or distributor that would like us to test something out for review? Contact us and we can let you know where to send the product and we will try it out.
5 Comments
Love mine although reading these other comments make me wonder if I need a stronger password…
I swapped mine out for the original hub (the mini). It seems to connect just fine to passphrase connections. Sadly I lose the ability make use of Matter but it at least gets me going until they can fix stuff on their end. I just won’t buy anything else for now.
I thought I was the only one that ran into this. No passphrase, no way! I gave mine to my sister. She doesn’t care about security as much.
Yep, I returned mine because of this. Too bad.
I want one and I want the locks but I won’t do it unless they support spaces in the router password. No way in hell am I going to rollback the security of my network for them.