What really would compel someone to actually develop a product which is a complete IoT-based home automation system? Could it be the need to improve the safety of your home, could it be the desire to live a Jetson-like life that millennials always dreamt of.
It is difficult to say, often, it is even more difficult to visualize the technology that is required to build a home automation platform.
Due to the complexity introduced by software, hardware and networking ecosystems, it becomes extremely important to learn, understand and utilize the right home automation technology for your smart home product.
We hope to address some of the concerns with this article.
Home automation has three major parts:
Each of these parts is equally important in building a truly smart home experience for your customers. Having the right hardware enables the ability to develop your IoT prototype iteratively and respond to technology pivots with ease.
A protocol selected with the right testing and careful consideration helps your avoiding performance bottlenecks that otherwise would restrict the technology and device integration capabilities with sensors and IoT gateways.
Another important consideration is the firmware that resides in your hardware managing your data, managing data transfer, firmware OTA updates and performing other critical operations to make things talk.
Rebuilding consumer expectations, home automation has been projected to target wide array applications for the new digital consumer. Some of the areas where consumers can expect to see home automation led IoT-enabled connectivity are:
We have talked about them before, but, let’s clearly separate them into components that would finally help you build a realistic model of what major components are involved in building a smart home. The major components can be broken into:
IoT sensors involved in home automation are in thousands, and there are hundreds of home automation gateways as well. Most of the firmware is either written in C, Python, Node.Js, or any other programming language.
The biggest players in IoT cloud can be divided into a platform as a service(PaaS) and infrastructure as a service(LaaS).
Again these platforms are extremely divided over the IoT application and security-related features that they provide. A few of these platforms are open source.
Let’s have a look at what you should expect from a typical IoT platform:
Apart from what we mentioned above, more and more platform builders are open sourcing their libraries to developers. Take for example the Dallas temperature library for DS18B20 for Arduino was quickly ported because of open source development to a new version that helped developers to integrate DS18B20 with Linkit One. Understanding these things become crucial as IoT tends to evolve continuously and having an equally responsive platform makes it business safe to proceed.
Let’s now deeply evaluate each of these components, starting with IoT sensors
While there are some protocols that clearly offer much more than others, but it is always important to start from your smart home development needs and then move towards narrowing down the solutions.
The commonly preferred protocols are Bluetooth low energy, Z-wave, Zigbee, and Thread. The protocol selection can now be narrowed down by the following factors:
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