Wink even had a Wink Relay, an in-wall mounted display that looked a lot like a Brilliant Smart Home Control. Products at Home Depot had little stickers that said “Works with Wink” and if you had a problem, you could call their tech support and a real human would help you troubleshoot your smart bulb, switch or other compatible product. In our early days of using smart home technology, one of the things we really liked about our first Wink smart home hub was that the company really worked hard to make sure that other company’s smart home products worked with their platform. Brilliant lets homeowners control all these different apps and more from one screen, and even lets you do things together, like see who’s at your Ring Doorbell and let them in via your Kwikset or Yale smart lock. Popular brands like Ring, Sonos, WeMo and TP-Link generally use Wi-Fi and each require a separate app, and while this makes them easy to install and support, consumers quickly get tired of having a bunch of apps to run their house. And if you are replacing 2 or more switches in the same box, it even includes touch sliders to control them. The Brilliant smart home control replaces one or more switches in your home with a touch screen that can control a huge range of DIY consumer smart home products from one interface and companion app. We got to see it in action when they first launched it in San Diego at the CEDIA conference, a convention for those high-end home integrators, and we loved the concept from the very beginning. In 2018, Brilliant announced their solution for DIY smart home control for everyone, the Brilliant Smart Home System. Enter the Brilliant Smart Home Control Panel We are geeks ourselves and while we’ve tinkered, we’ve never gotten around to installing one in all the years we’ve used home automation. Sure, there are a lot of ways to take an old iPad or Android Tablet, mount it up and use an app to control it, but while those are great, it takes a special kind of geek to want to spend their weekend setting that up. Until recently, this kind of easy-to-use smart home display was out of reach for most DIY smart home consumers. Home integrators make everything work together and set it up so everyone in the house can have a simple way to control what they need. Over the years they’ve become touchscreens and have become much more sophisticated for some high-end platforms, with the ability to see all the cameras outside the house, know the temperature in every room, and control the whole-house sound system. Home automation companies have been installing display panels in smart homes for decades. The guest room is one of the only rooms in our house without an Amazon Echo and we don’t want to have to train our guests in our complicated Alexa language. Not all of our guests are down with Alexa, and some think she’s just plain creepy. A few things share the name Breakfast Light, which one did you want?)įinally, it can be awkward for guests. ![]() We also have rooms with multiple smart switches (Alexa turn on Breakfast light…. Naming things can also get complicated – for us, we have so many things that we forget what we called them – especially for things like an attic light that we don’t use a lot. It’s not great for checking the status of things then taking an action, for instance, if you’re not sure you left the light on in the attic, you can’t really ask Alexa, you can only ask her to turn it on or off. Voice control is great, but it’s not always practical. Then Alexa came on the scene and changed everything – we could now turn everything on and off just by asking. Opinions and conclusions are our own.Ĭontrolling your smart light bulbs and your garage door from your phone is great if you are away from home, but at home, it is silly to whip out your phone to turn a light off when you could just get up and flip the switch, and even more ridiculous to open up your phone inside your car instead of pushing the button on your remote.Īs we added more and more devices and smart home hubs to control them all, we got smarter by adding sensors and timers so we didn’t need our phones. We received the Brilliant Smart Home Control Panel as part of this review. When we first started our DIY automation journey back in 2013, we started replacing a lot of things in our home with Wi-Fi gadgets with companion smartphone apps.Īffiliate Disclosure: This page contains links that may earn us a commission from Amazon Services LLC Associates Program.
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