Solutions in Energy Efficiency and Domotics

Why making a Smart Home?

Smart homes allow you to have greater control of your energy use, all while automating things like adjusting temperature, turning on and off lights, opening and closing window treatments, and adjusting irrigation based on the weather. They provide insights into energy use that can help you become more energy efficient and mindful of ecological factors. Smart homes can pinpoint areas where you are using more energy than you need to, allowing you to cut back in those areas and save money.

It has also been proved to be a tremendous benefit for the elderly and disabled, providing a wide range of features that can aid in those with particular accessibility concerns in their homes. These technology systems and assisting equipment have become a viable option for those who would rather stay in their homes than move to assisted living facilities, changing their lives every single day. Examples of this are:

• • Automatic Light Controls
• • Automated Doors and Locks
• • Home Safety and Security
• • Automated Appliances
• • Medicine Dispensing Devices
• • Automated Reminder Systems
• • Personal Safety (reporting falls or hits to a relative)
• • etc.

Smart Product Development and IoT

Creating a new electronics product is no walk in the park — there is much research, planning, and strategy involved. It has many rounds of revisions, trials, and errors. Bringing a new product to market is not quick or easy. That is why, several steps must be followed in order to reach a product that satisfy all requirements such as, low consumption, reliable, secure, safe, upgradable and durable; specially for embedded devices.

Software Development

Besides the capabilities of a Smart Home, it is needed to review the philosophy on which all the components are going to work. Our vision for the smart home is the the Open Home. This concept was coined by the Open Source community of Home Assistant. It defines the values that we put at the heart of every decision we make while developing products and software for smart homes. The Open Home is about privacy, choice and durability.

Privacy

Your home should be your safe space. A place where you can be your true self without having to bother about what the world thinks of you. A place where you don’t need to act differently to avoid an algorithm categorizing your behavior. Privacy for the Open Home means that devices need to work locally. No one else needs to know if you turn on a light bulb or change the thermostat. It is okay for a product to offer a cloud connection, but it should be extra and opt-in.

Choice

Devices in your home gather data about itself and their surroundings. Your data. Vendors shouldn’t be able to limit your access to your data or limit the interoperability of your devices with the rest of your smart home. Choice for the Open Home means that devices need to make the gathered data available through local APIs. This avoids vendor lock-in and allows users to create their own smart home with devices from different manufacturers. Nowadays, many devices for smart homes are built with ESP8266 and ESP32 chips, that allow people to change the firmware of the device and install one of the more versatile and complete firmware: Tasmota.

Durability

If there is one thing that technology firms are very good at, it is launching new products. However, maintaining the products and making sure they keep working is an afterthought for most. The result is that vendors can decide to no longer support your device, crippling it’s features or even prevent it from working at all. As we install more and more devices in our home, durability is becoming more and more important. We shouldn’t have to buy everything new every couple of years because the manufacturer decided to move on. Durability for the Open Home means that devices are designed and built to keep working. Not just this year, but for the next decade.