Smart Home Blog 2019
December
28th
Another batch of Arduino smart home shields arrived from JLCPCB today. These PCBs make it really quick and easy to prototype new smart home features.
27th
Got a few Sonoff Basic devices for Christmas, so I undertook a small project to evaluate them over the long term.
20th
Another interesting announcement that happened yesterday was Aerial Technologies announcing its Motion Capture Plug. I worked with this company whilst at BT, to trial and test an earlier version of this Wi-Fi occupancy sensing technology. It is really impressive.
19th
A very interesting announcement today ...
Amazon, Apple, Google, Zigbee Alliance and board members form working group to develop open standard for smart home devices. Project Connected Home over IP intends to simplify development for device manufacturers and increase compatibility for consumers. The industry working group will take an open-source approach for the development and implementation of a new "unified connectivity protocol". This is interesting as this is a concept we've been using in our our contextual smart home for over a decade now. It's the core concept behind our technology abstraction and in enabling our hybrid technology smart home. This is what enables us to integrate and use 3rd party products and technology in our smart home. Initiatives like this will greatly benefit the open source smart home community and DIY smart home developers too.
Whilst this is interesting, it isn't the panacea that everyone is thinking. This is primarily about making it much easier to connect a wider range of devices within your chosen eco-system and for them to work better together. The big players in the smart home space are only doing this as it makes it easier to connect more devices, which means they will sell more and the hurdles to leaving them grow so much higher. More importantly, the more devices you have connected, the more data they collect about you and the bigger the privacy implications become. This is only half of the smart home challenge though.
The other half that is not mentioned in this announcement, is in delivering the context and intelligence to make the smart home truly smart. This is the bit that really needs to reside within your home and the bit that you really need to keep private. There will be a huge competition between the biggest smart home players to be the provider of this and they will not be collaborating on this part of the smart home.
More details are on the website for Project Connected Home over IP.
And the question everyone was asking was, "Where is Z-Wave in all this?" And is if by magic ...
Silicon Labs and the Z-Wave Alliance announce plans to open the Z-Wave Specification as a ratified, multi-source wireless standard available to all silicon and stack vendors for development. Semiconductor and software suppliers will now be able to join the Z-Wave ecosystem, contribute to future developments of the leading smart home standard, and develop and supply sub-GHz Z-Wave radio devices and software stacks.
18th
The first batch of our Smartisant flood/leak sensors potted up to make them waterproof.
12th
Making up the first jig to enable our smart home sensors to be sealed with potting compound. We are going to need to make more of these as the production rate increases.
8th
Spent some time this week implementing virtual sensors in our contextual smart home. This is a really powerful concept, especially useful in advanced Heating, Ventilation & Cooling (HVAC) applications.
