What is a Smart Home?
Smart Home and the IOT (Internet of Things)
Short answer? It can and does mean a lot of things and no two smart homes are exactly alike. Smart home technology has grown organically from its early ‘geeky’ days. Smart home technology allows people to control and monitor their connected home devices from Smart home apps, smartphones, or other networked devices. People can remotely control connected home systems whether they are home or away. All of this is part of The Internet of Things, the interconnection via the Internet of computing devices embedded in everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data.
Examples of smart connected devices are smart thermostats, smart lights, smart outlets, and smart doorbells. My first smart device was a smart thermostat. It did everything a normal thermostat does but I was able to load an app on my smartphone and control it over my home wifi network. It was also smart in another way. The thermostat ‘learned’ what time we got up in the morning and left for work and created its own schedule to automatically adjust the homes temperature. Of course if I decided to stay up late bingeing my favorite TV series, I could just use my app to turn the heat up if my feet got too cold, all without getting on my feet!
So at a very basic level, a smart device can be monitored and controlled by the people who live there. Some devices, such a smart light bulbs go beyond just being turned on or offer via an app. Individual bulbs can be dimmed or even change color with a simple swipe from their app. Many smart devices do not directly communicate on the homes wireless network and require a hub or bridge to translate from the smartphone app or control system to its native language. Z-Wave and ZigBee are wireless radio frequency communication protocols designed for control, monitoring, and status-reading of connected devices. In other words, Z-Wave and ZigBee are the different “languages” your hub and devices use to “talk” to one another.
The greatest benefit from a smart home, combines the ‘connected’ part with the ‘automation’ part. Remember in a very simple scenario, we said a device controlled via an app made it smart right? So if I continue with this approach I have one app for my smart thermostat and another app for my smart light bulb, and another app for my… and so on. Not really much better than having five remotes to watch TV! This brings us to the concept of ecosystems. Devices in the same ecosystem not only share the same protocol but they may also share a common app. For example a lighting app can group multiple lights into a group and control them together or even communicate to a supported thermostat. The down-side of living only in one of these ecosystems is you may not be able to use a smart device because it uses a different protocol or lives in another ecosystem.
Another approach to ecosystems is ‘assisted systems’ like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. In addition to their role to allow voice commands, they also form an ecosystem to integrate with smart blubs, smart switches and other devices. Many DIY smart homers take this approach and add devices supported by their preferred assistant. But, again you may be frustrated in two ways. First setting up these assistant can require more geek-ness than you may have patience for and second, a smart device like my first thermostat may no longer work with other ecosystems as in the case of Nest after Google purchased them and moved it into their ecosystem.
A important point to make about smart solutions using off-the-shelf apps such as a lighting app, is their limitations on customization and personalization. This brings me to my favorite part of smart home technology - integrated control systems.
The best part of a quality smart control system is the ability to integrate with multiple ecosystems, so smart devices can be interconnected without many of the above limitations. Think of this as a system of systems. You may still have for example you lighting app that you have set-up lighting scenes for different rooms or events such as a party. An integrated control system can be programed with if-this-then-that logic to automate actions between smart devices that do not otherwise know about each other. For example a home owner arrives home and via geofencing or other sensors such the opening of the garage door, a welcome home scene is activated that launches the correct lighting scene, adjusts the temperature and turns on a favorite playlist to the living room and kitchen zones. The only limitation is the imagination and budget for how creative control system programing can be.
People love to personalize things and some control systems allow custom background images on control screens to be actual pictures of rooms, or family pictures, or pets or sports! Some even want their themes changes for seasons or holidays. We offer full customization of images with options for regular or special event changes as part of our remote support offering.
Let us know if this basic blog on Smart Homes was helpful and what you would like to learn in furture AV deep dives. Thanks!
