Earlier this month Quirky spun out its Wink smart home product line into its own separate company with the goal of building software to control the smart home. But as I wrote at the time, first it had to build some hardware in the form of a hub that will control not just the Wi-Fi-based Wink-Quirky gear but also the other smart devices already in the wild.

People who want to go beyond one or two purpose-built connected devices and start automating or trying to tie separate pieces of an existing home automation system together would want to use a hub to help get multiple devices on the same system and use one application instead of several. In general, hubs are not for those who want something to work right out of the box. They generally reward someone who who wants to tinker and tweak their system.

Wink’s hub, which…