Has anyone attempted or achieved a ceiling mount for the Hubitat hub? I am looking to get the best reception in a central location which happens to be in the centre of a large area.
I am looking into a ceiling mount setup but this obviously must be aesthetically pleasing.
My current option is to see if I can adapt a Ubiquity Unifi AP (essentially hollow it out somehow) to house the Hubitat hub and power it via POE with a converter located in the ceiling space.
Due to the small size of the hub it should fit. My concerns are heat due to confined area the hub will be in and always being located at ceiling level.
I have a spare AP for this but it is still working so a little overkill to destroy it. I would love to find a cheaper solution.
But being an Aussie, wouldn't you have to mount it to the floor instead? Sure you have never heard that before...
The only thing I remember seeing is a vertical stand someone 3D printed. You might look at thingiverse and see if there is something there that fits your needs. Otherwise, how about the old standby of double sided tape, or 3M command strips?
Very interested if you decided to print one. I haven't got into the 3D printing tech yet.
I was very confident that someone would have already done this but was surprised when I couldn't find any references on here.
Lots of choices on that thingiverse site after I dug around a bit. I believe there are 3D printing services you could send the file from below to have them print it for you.
This thread got into a few things but one of the outcomes was my wall mount (posted on Thingiverse for people to print). That can easily hold one on a ceiling (I can shake mine around without it slipping free).
The Ubiquiti AP is a great idea also. I just gutted two EOL ones (a square and circle) and was planning on putting a sensor up in there (was hoping to figure out a way for the LED ring to be useful also). Putting a Hubitat in could work well.
2 things to consider. One is ventilation as already mentioned. The other is that if you have high ceilings it is warm up there especially in summer . I would prefer to take steps to strengthen the mesh or alternatively have a second hub connected by hubmesh.
I also wonder about how the radio will work attached to a ceiling rather than sitting on a desk or bookshelf, etc. I've no idea if attaching it to a ceiling will make the hub radio less efficient, but I would guess that none of the testing that HE ever completed has been done w/hubs attached to a ceiling.
My Unifi AP is on my ceiling,but it's designed to be mounted that way...the HE hub is not.
I've mounting larger hubs on a wall. I used a small piece of plexiglass either screwed to the ceiling or using command strips.
Then velcro from the hub to the plexiglass (for easy removal)
The old VeraPlus hub stayed in that position for a couple of years....until the Hubitat hub took it down
Nah. The antennas in the hub are essentially, if not actually, omnidirectional. You might find a difference in the links if you could measure any two links in a direct comparison...but really that would be hard to evaluate, as the lines of sight (obscura) are going to be different from the countertop or closet vs the ceiling anyway.
But, at the end of the day, you could likely set the hub "top" down on a table and the signals would be just as good as they were before on any given link.
Now, if you set it on a Metal tabletop, or put it in a room with Lots of metal obstructions...well, thats an entirely different issue!
I guess the antennas on devices like the Unifi APs are more directional, I've seen comments in the Unifi forums about it beeing better to mount them "as intended" (e.g., don't put a ceiling mount AP on a wall, and vice-versa).
What I'd really like is a "visible spectrum" option so I could watch the radio signals from my hub in real time. That would be interesting...
Yeah, I suspect, except in certain cases like the dish type point to point antennas, thats BS.
If you put a unifi on the ceiling on the middle floor of a 2 story house, then go stand right above it, say a foot or two off center, I think you'll find that the EIRP is almost identical (minus path loss due to building materials and free space) to the EIRP if you were standing in a similar position below the antenna.
Sure the metal mounting structure inside the UAP might affect it at certain angles, but its not because Ubiquiti did any expensive antenna magic. Certainly not @ < $300 per device. Having said that, I've never taken one apart...perhaps @snell saw a fancy phased array antenna in there....lol
A spectrum analyzer would be cool for sure, but I dunno if it would tell us much!
Sure you have never heard that before...
