Fibaro has announced the third generation of its Home Center gateway for smart homes. Among other things, the device has a more powerful soc and the manufacturer has added support for zigbee, among other things.
In addition to Z-Wave support, as the Home Center 2 had, Fibaro’s HC3 also allows users to integrate hardware with the zigbee protocol. The Home Center 3 also offers support for WiFi-ac at 2.4GHz and 5GHz and for Bluetooth low energy. Unlike the predecessor, the antenna is built-in. The gateway can also be connected wired via an Ethernet port.
In terms of processor and memory, Fibaro has upgraded its Home Center. The processor is an arm quad-core with Cortex A53 cores at 1.2 GHz, where the soc of the HC2 was still a dual-core Atom at 1.8 GHz. Furthermore, there is now 2GB of RAM and 8GB of storage, as opposed to 1GB of RAM and 2GB of SLC storage, as well as 4GB MLC for recovery, in the Home Center 2.
In addition, the manufacturer reports that it has collaborated with Kaspersky Labs for security. As a result, the company cites the application of encrypted data transfer, both locally and remotely. In addition, the gateway is equipped with dual boot with a local backup and a backup via the Internet.
The price is still unknown. Fibaro’s HC2 is in the Pricewatch for an average of about 500 euros.