Control (Almost) All of Your Smart Home Technology With Brilliant Home Control Hub
In recent years, we’ve had to deal with a lot of different smart home hubs to run all of our different devices. Fortunately, however, the Matter protocol allows us to quickly integrate all of our smart home technologies into one central control center. These hubs can be apps on your phone like Google Home, HomeKit or Alexa, but physical hubs make it easier to control everything in your home. Brilliant Home Control , a physical hub that can stand alone or replace a wall switch, gives us a taste of what’s to come, and while there’s still room for growth, it’s pretty impressive.
Diamond is a beauty queen. It splits the hub into two parts: a digital touchscreen on the left and touch sliders on the right. You can choose the number of sliders depending on which switch you are replacing. In the wired version, you can choose from one to four switches, and in the plug-in version, you can choose two sliders. (Since they are not directly connected, you will have to choose what they control). When there’s no activity around, the screen goes to sleep and then uses motion sensors to wake up when people approach, displaying photos of your choice as the screen background. It’s so aware that I didn’t even realize it was sleeping until I read it in the specs and tested it. Most of the time you’ll be interacting with sliders to control nearby lighting.
Brilliant makes installation smarter
While the Home Control plug-in module mounts anywhere, the wired version requires a little more effort. However, I was impressed with the innovations. As with most smart devices, a neutral line (usually a white wire) is required for installation. While the tutorial videos didn’t match the current panel layout, it was much simpler than the typical installation. This is because Brilliant actually detects which wire is load and which is line, and it doesn’t matter what order you connect them in. This solves the problem with the vast majority of self-installed switches. Even though I live in an old house with terrible wiring, it was easy to set up and the hub itself clicked right into place.
Intuitive touchscreen user interface
Tapping the touchscreen will access the first of many interface screens. Although this elegant panel is packed with features, the user interface is clean and well-designed, and I never felt overwhelmed. The controls on offer won’t bog you down like other hubs, and you’ll never be more than two moves away from home. From here you can set up shortcuts for any action, be it entire procedures or simple one-time functions. Along the bottom is a row of icons that let you navigate to other screens, including scenes, allowing you to customize presets similar to Google Home and HomeKit. Perhaps you want a series of activities first thing in the morning or before bed, or “party mode” when guests have left. From here, you can navigate to “rooms,” which separate your devices by room, music, cameras, intercom, or alarms.
Multifunctional
Almost immediately after I set up Home Control, it started finding integrations, alerting me that Sonos was nearby. A few moments later, I had limited access to my Sonos devices. (In almost all cases, hubs don’t offer all the features that native apps do.) I could control all of my Sonos and pull music from recently used queues. While I couldn’t find any new music, Brilliant did offer a link to open Sonos’ own app and perform actions it didn’t have in its own hub. It then found my SmartThings devices without my input and helped me integrate the devices. It found my Ring doorbell and amazed me by transferring the video from the doorbell to Home Control. Moreover, Brilliant has both a camera and an intercom on board. If you have multiple Home Control devices installed, you can access video streams between them or, alternatively, use them as an intercom system.
You can use the app to control many of the things Home Control allows you to do, including arranging rooms, adding devices or integrations, and adding photos to the “splash screen” on your Brilliant display.
Limited integration options available
If you like the device as much as I like the Brilliant, it will hurt when you hit the wall. This wall here is integration. For the hub to function as a single core intelligence system, it must integrate with all things . While Brilliant supports Matter, the standard that will make this possible, their current list of integrations is extremely short . Of course, the major players are here: Philips, August, Schlage, Sonos, Ring and Nest, as well as powerhouses like Google, HomeKit and Alexa. But many of us have a circus of devices at home, such as Meross, Sylvania, SmartLife, Rachio, Midea, LG and Samsung. Without the ability to connect these devices, these shortcuts, scenes, and rooms don’t live up to their potential.
More triggers and more voice control required.
Speaking of Alexa, I bring up the second issue: Brilliant works limited with Google Home and HomeKit and clearly favors Alexa. In fact, Alexa takes up space in the bottom row of icons and cannot be removed or edited. If you have Alexa, great. But if you have Google or HomeKit, all you get from the integration is the ability to control wired, slider-controlled lighting through Google Assistant or HomeKit. We need triggers and automation, so being able to use them from Google and HomeKit is critical. While this is by no means my favorite long-term solution, I would have expected that at least the IFTTT integration would solve some of this problem and you’d be able to choose a voice assistant of your liking to replace that icon.
Will these integrations happen? Yes, and even without them, Matter is deployed on more and more platforms every year. But if your home is built around Meross smart plugs or Levoit switches, now may not be the time to purchase Brilliant.
Bottom line: Limited integration doesn’t detract from the benefits.
Even with these shortcomings, Brilliant Home Control is a feature-rich and aesthetically pleasing technology. I’m sure Brilliant will introduce more products and lines over time. And again Matter is approaching. Brilliant has committed itself to compliance on paper. But considering that the plug-in or wired version with one switch starts at $399, it’s an expensive option. If most of the smart technologies in your home aren’t on the integration list, wait until next year. Otherwise, it’s a decent hub that integrates into your home in a way that no tablet has ever done.