Skip to content
A4 civilengineering
  • Home
  • About Us
  • Education
  • Community
  • Thought
  • Ongoing Happenings
  • Contact Us
Menu Close

Blog

Home » Ongoing Happenings » Budget Smart Home: The Best Gadgets For Starting A Smart Home
Budget smart home: The best gadgets for starting a smart home – swiftheadline
Building a budget smart home from scratch can be a daunting task with hundreds of products on the market. And while it’s tempting to pick the absolute cheapest options, you’ll have to be a bit more careful if you care about future-proofing. The smart home industry is currently filled with competing ecosystems, and you could easily end up with incompatible devices once you start expanding.

To that end, let’s take a look at some pragmatic smart home gear that should play nice with any future upgrades you may have in mind.

The best budget smart home products
Amazon Echo (4th generation)

A smart speaker might seem like an obvious first choice to anyone starting out on their smart home journey. However, the fourth-generation Amazon Echo has an additional ace up its sleeve — it comes with an integrated Zigbee radio. This eliminates the need to buy a standalone hub, like in the case of Philips Hue.

While compatibility is not universal, the Echo works with Zigbee 3.0 devices from brands like Sengled, ThirdReality, and Hue. Beyond this list, you can look for third-party or customer reviews to determine compatibility. In general, though, only a small number of proprietary implementations (like Aqara’s Zigbee sensors) should refuse to work with the Echo.

See also: The best Echo speakers

Compatibility aside, the only downside to using an Echo device as your main Zigbee hub is that you might miss out on extra features and functionality. For example, Philips’ app offers sophisticated scene controls and the Hue Labs feature, which you’ll lose without the official hub. If you only care about the basics like on-off and dimming, the Echo is still a fantastic value, considering you can always upgrade in the future. Just keep in mind that the cheaper Echo Dot doesn’t have any Zigbee capabilities whatsoever.
Read More
swiftheadline.com

Read more articles

Previous PostHow buildings can adapt to the seasons
Next Post5 Things You Need to Know In 2022 About Smart Cities and IoT

You Might Also Like

Read more about the article Digital and the modern smart home

Digital and the modern smart home

October 13, 2021
Read more about the article How do smart buildings work?

How do smart buildings work?

October 11, 2021
Read more about the article The Future of 5G and IoT in Smart Cities

The Future of 5G and IoT in Smart Cities

December 14, 2021

Archives

  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021

Categories

  • 3D Printing
  • Air Quality
  • Architecture
  • Automation
  • BIM
  • Civil Software
  • Computer Vision
  • Constrcution Site
  • Digital Twin
  • Disaster
  • Earthquake
  • Edu Resource
  • Environmental
  • FreeCourse
  • Geotechnical Engineering
  • GIS
  • Industry News
  • Intelligent Transportation System
  • IOT
  • Market Analysis
  • Project Management
  • Remote Sensing
  • Sensors
  • Smart City
  • Smart Home
  • Smart Home/Building
  • Smart Materials
  • Structural Engineering
  • Structural Health Monitoring
  • Transportation
  • Uncategorized
  • Urban Planning

Recent Posts

  • Kontrol Technologies is in the thick of the commercial building upgrade supercycle
  • I-Bhd, China Mobile team up to build Malaysia’s first green smart building
  • FedEx launches AI-powered sorting robot to drive smart logistics
  • 8 trends shaping cities in 2022
  • DC joins growing list of cities requiring new buildings to include EV parking
A4 civilengineering
©2021 Privacy policy
  • Home
  • About Us
  • Education
  • Community
  • Thought
  • Ongoing Happenings
  • Contact Us

Enjoying the contents?

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter