Home automation today is expensive and complex, and will be composed of proprietary alternatives which have to be set up by experts. Very quickly, however, that model is being replaced with something else entirely.
A wide selection of low-cost, easy-to-install home-automation devices has arrived out there in the previous couple of years. These typically do simple things like change the lights, lock the doors and adjust the room temperature — all using basic equipment you already own.
Belkin
The new standard in home automation controllers is an iPhone or Android smart mobile phone. Home automation gadgets now typically use existing home Wi-Fi networks. And lots of the products take advantage of existing home infrastructure. By way of example, smart locks frequently don’t replace deadbolts, but are set up on them and really turn the locks for you. Bright bulbs plug into home lamps.
One illustration is Belkin’s WeMo Baby screen. Baby monitors previously came with a camera and a viewer and communicated with each other via a proprietary wireless network unique to each device. The Belkin variant takes the new strategy: The camera part comes in Belkin, however the viewer is an app on an existing phone. Plus they speak to one another via an existing home wireless network.
The one difficulty these share with predecessors is mutual incompatibility. Though they’re utilizing some of the exact same hardware and networks, they still do not interoperate with one another or provide a central point of control. The good news, though, is that invention (using a great deal of help in the crowd-funding movement) is fixing those issues.
Here’s what the future of home innovation will appear to be.
revolv.com
Revolv is an upcoming product which unites smart-phone-controlled house automation products into one controller — smart-phone controlled, obviously. (Revolv supports iPhone today and will support Android in the not too distant future, according to the organization.)
Revolve helps solve the house automation incompatibility problem. By way of example, different solutions have a tendency to utilize proprietary radio technologies for wireless connectivity and unique protocols for utilizing those radios. Revolve has seven radios built in and will support 10 protocols to overcome these incompatibilities. (Note that only three of those radios — Wi-Fi, Z-Wave and Insteon — will send from the first release.)
It’s a hub, and that the company says can be installed in one minute. When it connects to a house Wi-Fi network, a “magician” procedure finds out the smart-phone-controlled devices in your house. These can consist of products like the Belkin WeMo, Philips Hue, Insteon lightbulbs and Sonos devices, Kwikset locks, Honeywell programmable thermostats, Smarthome remotes and several more.
When these are connected, you are able to make things happen based on triggers, such as the time, or detectors, such as closeness, movement or surrounding lighting. By way of example, you might have the room temperature be altered to your taste beginning when you are 15 miles away from home, and also have the lights and stereo come on just as your entrance door is unlocked as you approach it.
Note that Revolv will be accessible only in the United States in the beginning.
The creators of the Revolv product have been playing around with combining Google Glass control with home automation.
Google Glass is a experimental apparatus worn like eyeglasses that provides a screen over the ideal eye. It is controlled by voice command and by touching a touchpad on the ideal side. It links to Wi-Fi and through Bluetooth to a smart phone, and runs special Google Glass programs. Google Glass is not readily available to the public yet, but only to about 20,000 or even 30,000 Google-selected men and women. (Full disclosure: I’m a Google Glass user and wear it daily — that’s me in the photo.)
Revolv now enables a Google Glass–special interface for doing precisely the same things you can do using an iPhone. By now Google Glass ships (in roughly a year, most likely), Revolv could evolve to support Google Glass out of the box.
What’s important to note about this is that at the time, Google Glass will be merely one of several options for wearable computing devices controllable with exactly the exact same or very similar ports, including voice control. 1 big platform will likely be smart watches — wristwatches that function like Google Glass does, more or less, enabling control of all in the home using a wristwatch.
This mixture of improvements — cheap, smart-phone-based products unified by a hub and controlled through wearable computing technologies — is the future of home automation.
Inform us : Are you beginning to automate more equipment in your house?