1Home Bridge

Summary

Voice control is the talk of the building automation community at the moment. We at Knxtra are asking ourselves ‘What is the best ways to do voice control?’. Well, since the 1Home bridge connects your KNX install to your all of your favourite personal assistants (Siri, Alexa and Google), it is a top choice. The smart assistant software developers have been working hard to create useful features such as grouping, timers, geofencing, and more which you get access to through the 1Home.

The 1Home bridge acts as a link between your KNX install to the web, with the 1Home bridge doing all the background work of linking your home to your choice of personal assistant. The setup is done by the KNX installer through a web portal that is easy to use but can be time consuming. The web portal takes the data from your ETS file and automatically tries to assign the controls to the correct group address. This process mostly works but everything still has to be double checked due to it not able to correctly assign the group addresses 100% of the time.

The connection is hosted by overseas 1Home servers which means that its reliability relies on them and when the servers are down, voice and smartphone control won’t work. This is a regular issue we have faced causing some frustrations. However, recently 1Home have released their brand new 1Home server product that includes many of the features of the bridge. Check out the 1Home Server review at the link below.