Oct 23 Podcast #971: Hoobs Home Automation Hub
This is a very short show this week. Ara is on vacation but we pre-recorded two segments. Ara purchased a Tribet FlyBuds wireless headphones with Active Noise Cancelation for his trip. The full review will be next week. These are just his initial thoughts. We also review the HOOBS Home Automation Hub. No news or email this week.
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About this item
- Industry-leading 4MIC Active Noise Cancellation - The Noise Cancelling Processor works by capturing and identifying ambient noise then subdues these frequencies for a cleaner listening experience(Reduces noise up to 30dB).
- Crystal Clear Calls with Environmental Noise Cancellation - For an even better, more peaceful listening experience, you'll benefit from the AI Noise Reduction Technology which gives excellent vocal enhancement and reduces background noise for clearer calls even in noisy environment.
- Transparency Mode for hearing what's happening around you - If you want to still hear what's happening around you but don't want to take your earbuds out, transparency mode is a great way to get the best of both worlds. Tribit uses active microphone technology to amplify the sounds around you so you can still hear your surroundings, whether it needs to cross the street safely or hear what your workout partner is saying. Same experience as Airpods Pro!
- 10mm Dynamic Drivers for Deep Bass - Dive fully into the sound and enjoy the 10mm dynamic drivers along with active noise cancellation for immersive sound. NOTE: For the best audio performance please twist the earbuds around in your ear until the sound and fit feel correct.
- 5 Pairs Eartips - To ensure the highest possible quality listening experience, having earbuds that fit properly is extremely important. Choose from these 5 pairs soft, flexible silicone tips for a customizable fit. Plus, further enhances the effectiveness of the Noise Cancellation.
Hoobs Home Automation Hub
A few months ago I added a Raspberry Pi running homebridge to my home automation system so that I could use Ring and Harmony products on Homekit. It works quite well but it did require quite a bit of fiddling and knowledge of SSH, Config files, networking, building software, and installing plugins. For software developers like us we’d rate that a 7 out of 10 on the difficulty scale. For someone without this knowledge we’d rate it an 11 out of 10 on the difficulty scale.
A few listeners emailed us about a solution called HOOBS (Homebridge out of the box system) that is supposed to make it much easier. It costs $170 for the complete system but if you already have a raspberry Pi you can buy a SD card with everything setup and ready to go for $20. For our test we went with the complete system out of the box.
Setup
The HOOBS box is about the size of a deck of cards and trival to get up and running, You plug in power, wait for it to boot up and install then connect it to your network with the ethernet cable that is provided. Next launch a browser and type hoobs.local into the address field. From there the system asks you to setup a user account and that gets the system up and running. It can’t do anything at this point but it's ready to be configured with plugins. This process takes about ten minutes. To get to the same spot of the Raspberry Pi without HOOBS took more than an hour!
What Next?
First thing you need to do is add the HOOBS hub to your Homekit setup. The interface has a QR code that you scan with your phone in the Home app. It gives you a warning that it is not a supported accessory. Once you are done the HOOBS Bridge is now added and any device that can talk to HOOBS will be exposed as a supported HomeKit Device.
Now you are ready to add plugins for your devices. In the HOOBS interface there is a good search tool that makes the process simple. Even the installation is one touch. We loaded our two plugins (Ring and Harmony) in a matter of minutes. The only place where the HOOBS process is still a bit geeky is the configuration. You don’t have to actually modify the configuration file in raw form for certified plugins (both the Ring and Harmony plugins are certified) but you still need to know what to do. There is no real clear explanation for the Harmony Remote plugin so you will have to hunt around. There are plenty of Youtube videos that will walk you through it.
The Ring plugin also required a bit of work. If you have two-factor verification turned on you need to run a command line application to get a key. The instructions are clear and Hoobs makes it simple to open a terminal window to run the command. Like the Harmony Plugin there are videos that show you what to do.
There are instructions on how to add the new devices to your Homekit system. Some devices just show up and others need to be added like any other supported device.
Other Thoughts
We were never really able to setup the Rasberry Pi to boot into Homebridge and allow for remote access. That meant each time the system needed to be reset we had to SSH into the Pi and setup remote access. Then we had to remote into the Pi and launch Homebridge. Hoobs has taken care of this but making Homebridge auto start. This is even true for installing plugins. HOOBS has certified (to work with HOOBS) many of the most popular plugins which makes them easier to find and install. The web interface is also a huge advantage in that with a little network administration can make the Hoobs interface available outside your home.
Conclusion
While we overwhelmingly feel that HOOBS has made the installation and setup of Homebridge more straightforward and easy to maintain. We won’t go as far to say that if you don’t have any computer skills it makes it easy. There is still some tweaking that needs to be done to get Homebridge running on your network. We recommend this for the techie person that just doesn’t want to spend a few hours setting up a Raspberry Pi and building and configuring Homebridge.
Reader Comments (1)
Hey Ara
Loved the show today. Iv got the ring doorbell 3 and echo show 8.and I love the auto show feature where the video just pops up on the echo show 8 when the door bell is pressed.
Once this is all setup with your apple TV. Does it do the same thing and have the video feed from the ring bell pop up on the apple TV?