FEATURE WIRELESS TECHNOLOGY HOME AUTOMATION FOR A SMARTER WORLD
Historically, limited due to lack of interoperability, poorly designed interfaces and high cost, truly smart home automation devices are about to move in says Patrick Mannion at Mouser Electronics
efforts, that is, in the absence of collaborative networks or standards. For example, Belkin has its Wi-Fi-based WeMo Switch and WeMo Motion Kit, Lowes has its Iris Home, Smart Home ecosystem for everything from IP video to smart plugs, Sonos does great audio, Phillips has Hue Lighting and Lutron has its light switch. With so many ideas around connecting
home devices do we need so many proprietary ecosystems and wireless interfaces protocols? There is Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee plus Z-Wave, and all with their own APIs and development environments? Maybe not. Like smartphones, home automation
development platforms are crying out for standardisation, making it fertile ground for Intel, Apple and Google to ply their trade. Last December, Intel announced its IoT
T
he home automation market, form security and health to energy monitoring
and entertainment, will reach $16.4 billion by 2019, according to Transparency Market Research (TMR). While their findings also identified some major hurdles, thanks to new platforms and innovation from all sides, many of those hurdles are shrinking, rapidly. While numbers may vary, TMR put its
finger on some very real and inconvenient truths. Specifically: while home owners want the supposed, “convenience, comfort, security, and entertainment value of home automation, the market is characterised by high-level inter and intra industry competition, complexity of solutions, multiple and incompatible standards, large number of networking technologies, and subsequent high-priced products.” Clearly we have a way to go before reaching automation utopia. Microsoft has also identified some of these issues in a report it completed with the University of Wisconsin called, “Home Automation in the Wild: Challenges and Opportunities.” Microsoft was researching a HomeOS at the time. The report studied a group of users many of whom relied upon ‘ye olde’ x10 networking technology. They found similar issues, but the over-arching response from users was that once systems worked, they enjoyed just being lazy. For example, one switch that could turn on all the first-floor lights. “It’s just amazing!” one user
14 SEPTEMBER 2015 | ELECTRONICS Figure 1:
Home automation applications will bring advanced monitoring and control capabilities accessible remotely from smart devices
quipped, obviously delighted to be able to so from the couch. Ironically, the other reason they enjoyed it
was the peace of mind and “security” aspect. The irony comes from the fact that home automation is now connected with the IoT and the latter is rife with security issues. Homeowners may already have more to be worried about from virtual attackers versus physical attackers.
“To
date, many home- automation networks have grown up around relatively independent efforts, that is, in the absence of collaborative networks or standards.”
But it’s all under control if you take the right precautions according to Gary Davis, Chief Consumer Security Evangelist at Intel Security. If the various wired and wireless networks don’t connect directly to the outside world directly, but instead through a suitably firewalled home gateway, then he’s confident that the home network is secure. You would be too, until you talk with Augustus ‘Skip’ Ashton, VP of
software at Silicon Labs. Skip’s amused take is that if any deterrents are put in place at the
chip, system, or home level, that’s ok: hackers will just get your data somewhere else. “There are so many other, easier, ways to access your personal information,” he said. From “the edge” of the Internet to the server, the portals for black-hat operators are everywhere. Home networks are, for better or worse, the least of our worries. To date, many home-automation networks have grown up around relatively independent
Platform, a comprehensive suite of tools and support to ensure what it identified then as the five pillars of IoT: security, ease of use, seamless data ingestion and processing, clear customer value, and finally, services. The Platform comes atop an ecosystem that Intel had already developed for IoT and home automation around its Edison chips and Galileo boards. Intel’s goal is to make home automation and
every IoT application simple to design, implement and use. However, when it comes to ease of use for Home Automation, Apple and Google are bringing their battle inside the home atop their smartphone platforms, iOS 8.1 or higher, and a skinned version of Android, called Brillo. Apple’s HomeKit will be incorporated into AppleTV Gen 3 and later, and partners announced to date include Lutron (lighting), EcoBee (thermostats), Insteon (LEDs to door locks), Elgato (wireless sensors), and iHome (smart outlets). While HomeKit itself was announced in June of 2014, Google’s official entry into the Home Automation space came more recently: on May 28, 2015 it announced Project Brillo, a “polished down” version of Android for the IoT. Along with Weave, a protocol for communications between IoT devices, Google is also making development for the smart home as simple as possible. Brillo, according to Google, will be available
in Q3 of this year, while Weave will roll out over the coming months, with the developer stack coming sometime in Q4. The age of really smart devices versus devices that we wish were smart, is fast approaching.
Mouser Electronics
uk.mouser.com 01494 467490
/ ELECTRONICS
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60