Amazon Echo Hub | 8” smart home control panel with Alexa | Compatible with thousands of devices

A hustle for power compatibility… But totally worth it! Perfect solution for our house
I moved to a house last year and installed all kind of smart devices: switches, locks, motion sensors, thermostats, and cameras (indoor and outdoor) which I wanted to manage not just from our phones, but from a central console, and the echo hub seemed like the perfect fit when it was announced.The previous owner had an ADT console which was not compatible with any of the smart devices I installed, so I took it out of the wall and waited 6 months for the echo hub to be released. When I could finally buy it I was really excited, but then the hustle began…The old console was working with in-wall low-voltage generic cables. Voltage was 9V, which was what the echo hub needed according to the manual. However, when I connected it showed an error due to “not enough power”.I was reluctant to do out-of-wall cable management at first, so I was really close to do a big hole in the wall to connect an outlet from a close-by light switch, but the echo hub is so small that the edges of the recessed electrical box would show. And yes, I wrote recessed “electrical box” because all the recessed outlets I found were too small to fit the echo hub outlet connector (which is massive)…At the end I settled for out-of-wall cable management and it is fine, we like it and cable length was just perfect to reach the closest outlet as shown in the picture.Once installed and connected, everything has worked as intended. All my kasa, eufy, nest and amazon devices have synced with no problem and the multi-camera display for the outdoor ones is really amazing and useful. We created a speaker group including the hub and music sounds great with different echos synced perfectly reproducing surround sound. Sound quality of the device is good for the size. Proximity sensor works great. The possibility to reproduce amazon photos as screensaver is very nice. We have not tried playing video, but it seems to be possible via different apps.In summary, power connectivity could be easily improved including a rechargeable battery as any tablet, so generic low-voltage cables (5V or 9V) work and you are not bounded to use their connector. However, the reality is that the hub was exactly what we needed and wanted as smart home central console, consolidating everything together in a great way. I have not found anything even close to this wall-mounted solution in the market so compatible with other brands (and have researched extensively). I hope it keeps working like it has been doing so far.

Nice but Not Perfect – InWall Install is Difficult at Best
I generally really like the Echo Hub. As others have said, it’s not an Echo Show, but a smart home center that can pull your cameras, Ring Alarms, Ring keypads, lights, switches, and other smart devices into a nice wall-mounted panel that offers convenience apart from your phone. It’s meant to be set up, customized, and left alone. It’s not meant to watch TV or interact with like a Show. I have one for each floor of a three-story house and another in our primary bedroom. Three are powered by the 12-volt wire that was already in the wall from our old security system, and one is powered by splitting off the PoE of an already existing in-wall ethernet port in the adjacent room.The Black Friday sale made these much more palatable at just over $100 each and I made my own fast-charging power adapters for just under $6 each. This is my biggest complaint with the Echo Hub. They aren’t really PoE compliant or ready since they don’t have an ethernet port and they don’t just require a Power Delivery (PD) adapter like Amazon states. They require a PD3.0 or PD3.1 adapter that optionally supports Programmable Power Supply (PPS). After a couple of weeks of trial and error I made four power adapters from AITRIP PD65W Fast Charging Type-C USB modules that provided the proper PPS power. I added a REVODATA Gigabit PoE Splitter ($13 additional) to power one of them with 12-volts and 2-amps (24 watt) while maintaining the ethernet data port in the adjacent room. The Hubs look professionally installed since all the power connections are completely hidden in the wall.I also bought the Hubs for Thread and Matter support of window shades. Unfortunately, they didn’t play nicely with other Echo’s nearby, so I disconnected them. Thread connections are much more stable now. However, the shade motors will sometimes flash that they have disconnected. They usually reconnect but will occasionally become unresponsive and show as such in the Alexa app. Thread simply isn’t ready for primetime. At least I have new Hub border routers and a several Thread shades to test software update stability. I wish I could talk to a second-tier engineer instead of getting canned responses from Amazon. Oh well.I didn’t give 5-stars to the Echo Hub. There are more issues, mostly minor, than just the power and Thread issues.1. The interface is SLOW. It needs more horsepower to be more responsive!2. I think the Hubs looks pretty nice on the wall but could be more modern looking by being thinner and having smaller bezels.3. One of the four Hubs shipped with a faulty power adapter that gave a startup error as many others have mentioned.4. I find the brightness of the screen to be very difficult to precisely control. The Hub tries too hard to be “smart”. Why not allow the user to set the exact lowest and highest brightness settings?5. The proximity sensor works well, but I turned it off because the only option to allow the screen to toggle back to the main clock interface takes 10 minutes and can’t be adjusted. WTH? The Hubs are wall-mounted in the highest traffic areas to make them accessible, especially for disarming the Ring alarms. The clock and background images almost never show when proximity is turned on since someone is almost always passing by.