I’ve written lots of articles about Switchbot and their hubs in here. To date the best has been HUB 2 – nice little hub with temperature and humidity display – BUT it’s a bit flimsy and tends to fall over easily. I have two of them. Of course I COULD have wall-mounted them but didn’t think of that. Enter HUB 3 – the game-changer.
For starters, Hub3 is much more substancial than Hub2 – comes with the same USB lead with inline temperature/humidity sensor (good idea) – and comes with power supply (standard plug-in-the-wall USB-C). And it’s black. I just opened the box, put the unit on the table, clipping the 2 parts together after connecting the USB-C power input, turned it on, told the Switchbot APP to add Hub3 and voila – done (it does that thanks to an initial Bluetooth connection to the phone – common practice).
I’m looking now at the lead photo I just put up – and I can see a background on the display not visible when actually viewing – that clarifies the display type – LCD, not OLED. Sorry about the dust – this is real-world southern Spain in summer – not a sterile photo studio.
I got the usual reminder that only 2.4Ghz WiFi is supported (I guess that will continue until people start using the very latest ESP32 with 5Ghz support – not that 5Ghz is needed here).
Seconds later the hub was connected. Almost immediately an upgrade notice appeared. I did that and in no time – “upgraded successfully”. V13.8.9
All very easy up to now, I’ve not even opened the manual or looked at the various stickers which come with Hub3.
In the App I see the temperature and Humidity as well as room light level 2 (no idea what the scale is yet and they’ve just changed it in the upgrade apparently). The Device is showing the same info. The APP says I’ve not added any IR remote controls yet and I’ve no plans to.
The display brightness on the device seems to be dependend on ambient light levels as it changes as I move around the hub. APP – displayed data… I’m going to add in weather as the hub display looks a little empty right now.
That was easy. It asked me what I wanted to use as the source for temperature – I selected the hub inline sensor. IInitially I had no idea why right now the temperature at the very top is different to the main temperature reading – so I dropped a line to Switchbot and the answer came back within a day – the top reading is forecast reading not actual.
The hub has a centre control that rotates, an on-off button, a home button, a back button and something that looks like a connection button (lightning) – all very subtle and neat. To do more, I have to add devices to the hub – my various Switchbot devices are already attached to my Hub2 hubs so I’ll have to think about that – but first – breakfast…
Lets for a second compare the look of both Hub2 and Hub3… Oh – and Hub3 has an IR blaster on the very top.
Hub3 has a built-in speaker – can replace any number of IR controllers and has motion and light sensors . The display can also show the date and time.
In all this is a major development from the Hub2 devices – rock solid on a desk. Hub3 is visually well suited to show off anywhere in the home. Shortly I’ll show it connecting to the new smart lock from Switchbot and other devices.
This is interesting. I took a look at Home Assistant and because I have the Switchbot integration in there – Hub3 magically appeared… humidity, luminance, light level, temperature… AND MOVEMENT when I went near the device.. actually when the unit was pointing in my direction, the movement sensor triggered from around a metre away – that was unexpected… great. I did see a YouTube video about having to use MATTER to get that connectivity with Home Assistant – I didn’t – it just appeared in HA magically.
Why the on-off buttons on the right? Well, when controlling an external device like another Switchbot device – they provide a convenient way to turn stuff on and off. So much more to this device – I’ll extend this as I add Switchbot and compatible gadgets.
Initially I thought I’d blog about the HUB3 and the nwe Switchbot Lock Ultra – but when I opened the lock box, I realised that this entry would become unfeasibly long if I tried to fit the lock in here – so consider the forthcoming Switchbot Lock Ultra article as Part 2 of this “Big Update”.
Hub 3 – Solution for a lack-lustre generic air-conditioner
BUT HOLD…. I’d not touched IR until this week and – looking at IR controlled devices, I went to the sectionon air-conditioners, pointed my cheap and chearful dumb Spanish IR aircon remote at HUB3 – thinking – no chance – this isn’t going to work – and yet, it DOES.
The Switchbot APP can control my not-smart reversible air-conditioning – all I did was press ON on my air-conditioning IR control and the Switchbot APP asked me to confirm that it works. Unbelievable. Full control over my air-confitioning. I’ve tried cool, on, off vanes, temperature… all perfect. Thanks to my use of Tailscale, I’ve already checked, I can control the aircon when I’m away from home just as easily as if I were sitting right next to it ands all of those controls you see above right WORK. Honestly, all I did was test the ON button.
And if you look at the photo below – you’ll see the unit is hardly a household name.
In fact – though I can see the name on the front of the internal unit – I can’t spell it – hence the photo to show you. I could not find abything remotely like this make in teh list of airconditioning units in the Switchbot APP hence the learning of the on button.. I can’t believe it worked that easily.
Up to now, the only way I could get computer control of this aircon was to take Home Assistant, TASMOTA IR, learn every code from the handset and import into the climate HA integration… and that was not easy – you don’t have a code for temperature up and another for temperature down – it’s way more complicated than that – yet the Switchbot APP and HUB3 just picked the lot up magically. I’m impressed. Antonio – are you reading this? I can’t see any sign of the aircon control in Hub 3 itself but on my phone in the switchbot APP it works a treat.
As for Home Assistant, nothing about the air conditioning control yet, looks like I’ve some new learning coming up. Meanwhile I’m moer than happy with the phone control from anywhere. Did I mention IR output? The Hub 3 output is 150% that of HUB 2 and I’ve not even oriented HUB 3 – which is at the opposite side of my office to the aircon and yet – perfect.
