Just wondering out loud …
I think many have at least one hub on their mesh with radios disabled and dedicated to LAN or cloud integrations or designated as a central hub for additional apps.
So my question is, would there be enough interest to make a business case for Hubitat to release a version of the C8 pro without radios?
Would anyone be interested in this assuming it would make an impact on the sale price?
If it has USB ports (to allow external Zigbee adaptors) and can run Zigbee2MQTT, Mosquito broker, NodeRed, InfluxDB, and Grafana - yes! 
So, HE Green? 
I’d be down for such a device as it could be used for a Hub Mesh coordinator hub.
To be able to easily run Hub Mesh like a true hub (coordinator hub) and spoke (device hubs) architecture would be great.
Having a more cost effective no radio hub supports that concept.
I think the staff have implied that there is not (a business case), although variations of this have come up from time to time in the forums and some people would certainly be happy to see it.
I did search, evidently not well enough, to see if it had been discussed before and was hesitant on posting.
Now considering the extra costs of the additional antenna AND the radios I wonder if it might make it more appealing. But i really did think the chances were slim.
I think what I’ve seen most often before is suggestions re: detaching the hub firmware from the hardware, i.e. having the option to run the platform on the hardware of one’s choosing a la home assistant.
I’ve gotten the impression they don’t intend to segment their platform and its hardware very much.
However, with the release of the C8 Pro, I’m sure anything’s possible in terms of how they might reconsider past positions on topics like this.
Yeah it’s probably a slim chance of such a device coming out.
But it would make it an easy choice to dedicate such a hub to act as a coordinator hub for cloud, lan, rules, dashboards and what not over relegating a older or newer hub with actual radios to those duties.
Since the current radio (I forget which one - zigbee or zwave) is on even when it is disabled, I would think a radioless hub would be a nice alternative. Do I see it happening? No.
This is one option that I'm not sure I see Hubitat ever doing. From a business perspective, they would need to charge for the initial installation and for upgrades. Would consumers really be willing to do that?
What I can see them potentially doing is releasing both a regular and a pro model moving forward. I think the price delta might need to be larger, but a regular C9 for $125-150 and a C9 Pro for $200-225 might work depending on what the main differences are between the two.
Would it work to:
...and call it good?
I know you're still paying for a full hub, but given the tiny likelihood that HE will produce a non-radio hub, this could work, especially for those of us w a few extra hubs sitting around from serial upgrading. 
Honestly, as my house continues to grow with smart home stuff, I wouldn't be opposed to buying a full hub if I could later download firmware that removed all things Zigbee and Zwave. Let me have maximum amount of memory and processing without the radios in the firmware. Make it so that owners have to jump through some hoops to get access to it, but I would be on board.
If you remove all Radios from C8 the HW will be just a plain computer.
This version could be running basically on any HW (such as RPi, etc.) if HE will be willing to
release some sort of Installation Image (or something like this).
This has previously been discussed at length. While it’s certainly not my call, I believe it will never be done because of the support issues of supporting a variety of platforms, among other reasons.
Yes and no. I am EE dealing with embedded systems left and right.
Hub without Radios is nothing more than a very basic generic computer:
CPU+RAM+FLASH(Storage)+Ethernet/WiFi+USB
I might be missing something but in the above scenario (HE minus Zigbee and ZWave radios) it looks like there is no other very specific HW is involved. The differences between various CPUs and
generic IO Devices (listed above) is very well taken by compilers and OS Kernels.
So, It may not be very difficult to create some sort of Radio Free HE installation image (or so, I am
EE, not SW person) targeted for the generic HW.
And just thinking loudly (and an idea for hackers) - it could be possible to install Home Assistant on the HE hardware (specifically C8 Pro with more memory). I don't see why this cannot be done.
Anything can be done with enough motivation and resources.
But when staff have commented on topics like this in the past, it’s been pretty clear they have no intention of moving in such a direction.
I am also an EE
Funny story - the latest QC chipset we kicked up for the first time got hung in the secondary boot loader.
QC ref design had five camera, we only had two in our design, so we were able to remove one of the two PMIC dedicated to the cameras, Easy peasy, right?
Well the software did a full stop when it could not talk to the second PMIC.
So, no ... sometimes things don't run correctly when you remove things from the design.
Of course if SW is targeted for a very specific HW configuration and desperately is looking for the all HW components to be present and functional. Very well could be an HE approach for the SW development. And if "yes" sooner or later this creates a maintainability/expendability related problems.
But this is very different topic and discussion.
So in that context (don't remove HW that the system expects to be there), shouldn't it work if the radios are SW disabled and then de-soldered from their antennas? SOC would have no idea that nothing was getting out, as long as it could still see the disabled antennas, right?
Just curious if this "home brew" option seems possible...
It would be a crap shoot that only the HE could answer for sure. We already now that on a in the C7 the zwave radio does not get power cycled during a reboot, so most likely the SW talks to it at some point even to disable it. If it's not there, who knows what the error recovery will do.
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