invisible: home

To Dropcam or Not To Dropcam

Wed, 10 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

TODO

How to Make Your House "Smart"

Tue, 26 Jul 2016 08:50:00 +0000

How do you make a “dumb” house “smart”?

As consumers, we have more choices today than ever to stuff our houses, apartments and condos with “smart home” gadgets. From light bulbs to thermostats to cameras to door locks, there are few parts of a house left today that can’t be “made smart” with a little effort. Of course, most of this has been possible for years with expensive, hard-wired smart home systems installed during new home construction, but the maturing wireless standards, like ZWave, ZigBee and Bluetooth Mesh, have finally put the smart house in reach for the millions of homes without pre-installed wiring.

So that’s what I’ve been doing.

Over the course of the last few years and two or three houses, I’ve been picking my way through the wild west of “retrofit” smart home gadgets, looking for that combination that is easy to manage and truly “feels smart.”

Everyone starts with Hue bulbs, right?

Like most people, I started my smart home journey with some Hue lightbulbs, that addictive “first hit” that opens your eyes to the possibilities a connected house creates. If you can change a lightbulb, you can install Hue lights, and a few minutes later begin marveling at lights that can be controlled from your phone.

That was fun. Time to install a Nest thermostat.

It takes a little more installation work, but now you can also control your thermostat from your phone, and (theoretically) more easily program heating and cooling cycles. Your wall looks cooler now, too.

What next? Maybe a Dropcam? Maybe a plug-and-play Belkin motion sensor?

Pretty soon you realize that you’ve got a growing collection of smart home gadgets, and you start to think about how they could work together:

Maybe your lights could turn-on when a motion sensor is triggered
Maybe your thermostat could auto-adjust based on a weather station
Maybe you could create “scenes” that would make lights and outlets and things work together

Now what? You’ve got a bunch of easy to install, one-off smart home gadgets, but how do you tie them altogether?

Sure, you can “hack” together some linked behaviors using IFTTT (If This Then That), but it’s a band-aid that is sure to frustrate…unless you like waiting unpredictable amounts of time for a trigger to update your smart home devices. No, what you now need is a smart home “brain.”

Graduating to Smart Home “Hubs”

Unless you enjoy jumping between fifteen separate apps to manage your smart house, you need a “brain” that bring everyting together. Enter: the smart home “hub.”

Smart home “hubs” (or sometimes “controllers”) are responsible for talking to all of the connected devices in your house and making them work together.

Except in very large homes, you only need one smart home hub, to which all devices will wirelessly connect. Most hubs come with a number of different radios built-in (ZWave, ZigBee, Wifi, and Bluetooth are the most popular) so they can communicate with a wide variety of devices. Most hubs also enable “cloud” integrations, so you can control devices that won’t connect locally (like Nest, Ecobee, Netatmo or Sonos) via their available APIs.

There are MANY different hub options available today, including:

Vera
SmartThings (by Samsung)
HomeSeer
Iris (by Lowes)
Zipato

Each has its pros and cons (discussion for another time), but if you have one, you’re ready to begin making your house smart. In my house, I’m currently using a Vera Plus.

Now you just need to connect some devices to your hub.

Connect All the Things!

No, really. Connect all the things.

With smart homes, the more connected your house is to your hub, the more powerful and interesting things it will be able to do for you. There’s an endless list of devices you can add to a smart home, but some common types are:

Light switches
Motion sensors
Open/Close sensors
Thermostats
Door locks
Security cameras

Just buy a compatible smart home device, install it, pair it with the hub and your house becomes a little bit “smarter”…well, not really “smarter” yet, but a bit more “connected” so that it can become smarter later.

And you don’t have to do everything at once. Smart homes can expand over time as your budget allows and as you think of new ways to enjoy the power of a connected home.

Finally, once you have a hub and a few devices connected, you can use one app control your entire house, and you can begin to create “scenes” and “triggers” to devices work together.

Putting the “Smart” in Smart Home

So far, all you have is a “connected” home. A bunch of devices that can wirelessly communicate with a central hub. At best, you have a “remote control” home. To make a “smart home” smart, it needs to be taught how to do things for you.

For this we need triggers, scenes and modes. Different smart home hubs use different names, but the concepts are the same.

Triggers

Triggers, as the name implies, let you define events that should drive actions in your smart home. They are the basic building block of making a connected home appear “smart.”

A common trigger example is using a motion detector to turn-on a light when motion is detected. Or dimming lights a specific time. Or adjusting the thermostat based on outside temperature. There are many different ways to define triggers, but they are how a smart home knows when to do something automatically. Without a trigger, all smart home actions have to be manually triggered, which is still powerful, but more “remote control” than “smart.”

Scenes

Scenes (or “programs” on some hubs) allow you to orchestrate the settings of multiple devices at one time. Rather than turning-off all lights one-by-one at night, a “Good Night” scene could automatically turn-off all lights, lock the doors and turn a nightlight on in the hallway (for example). When a scene runs, it will send commands to one or more of your connected devices and change the device’s settings based on the scene configuration.

Scenes can be used with triggers or run manually, like super powerful switches.

Modes

Most smart home hubs also have the concept of “modes” to make a smart home behave differently in common scenarios. Modes are usually “Day/Home,” “Night,” “Away” and “Vacation.” A hub can use changes between modes to change the settings on connected devices (maybe you want to turn-off the AC and enable water leak sensors on vacations) and enable or disable scenes or triggers.

The general goal is to make the smart home operate more efficiently depending on how (and when) it’s being used.

This is probably the hardest part of making a smart home truly delightful and “smart.” It takes time to program the various scenes and triggers that work with your devices, and it can even be difficult to think of the kinds of settings that are possible now with a connected home. If there’s one area where smart home hubs still need to evolve, its doing more to make a house feel smart without less manual effort.

With a little time, patience and trial-and-error, you’ll finally be on your way to living in a smart home of the future. Good luck!

Choosing a smart home controller

Fri, 15 Jul 2016 10:21:00 +0000

If you really want to make your entire home “smart,” you’ll eventually need a smart home “hub” or “controller.” These hubs act as the brain of your smart home, helping connect your various smart home devices and then sending the commands that make them work together. Hue Lights and Nest Thermostats are fun, but without a hub, they are islands of functionality that will struggle to scale as your smart home matures.

Okay. So, it’s clear. You need a hub. How do you choose?

There are many options on the market today, at a wide range of price points and capabilities. Before making a specific recommendation, it’s important to understand the key characteristics of smart home hubs.

Key characteristics of smart home hubs

All smart home hubs are meant to solve the same problem: connect smart home devices, monitor their status and control them with scenes, triggers and commands. There are some important differences in the way different controllers attempt to perform this task, though:

Supported Wireless Standards
Broad vs Limited Device Support
Embedded vs Installed Software
Cloud vs Local Processing

Supported Wireless Standards

For years, smart homes required hard wired connections that could only be added at the time of construction. Legacy solutions, like X10, tried to overcome this by communicating over power lines, but these solutions were notoriously difficult to setup and maintain.

New, modern wireless protocols have changed the game, though, finally make wireless home automation (reasonably) reliable and easy to setup. The most popular of these modern protocols are:

ZWave
ZigBee
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
Wifi

Of these protocols, ZWave and ZigBee are tailored to the smart home task. Both are mesh networking technologies, meaning every new device you add to your smart home expands the reach and strength of the wireless network. This is a big advantage over Wifi’s “hub and spoke” network model, where everything must talk to the wifi access point. ZWave and ZigBee are also low-power protocols, making them ideal for battery-powered devices.

Bluetooth may become a more popular choice in the future when if the nascent Bluetooth mesh networking protocol is widely adopted. For now, Bluetooth’s limited range makes it impractical for large smart home setups.

Between ZWave and ZigBee, ZWave offers better compatibility between hubs and devices thanks to its proprietary nature. ZigBee is an open standard, but has struggled to maintain compatibility between manufacturers. If I had to spend money on devices today, I’d buy ZWave for maximum compatibility assurance.

There are other protocols, of course.

Insteon is an evolution of the old X10 protocol, traveling both over powerlines and wirelessly. Ideal primarily in homes where a lot of X10 hardware already exists.

Lutron, popular provider of light switches and window coverings (both “traditional” and “smart’), has their own RF protocols that some hubs support.

Nest created the Thread protocol in 2014, but so far there is very limited support outside of the Nest products.

Bottom line: Make sure you pick a hub that supports the standards you need. And if you have a choice, choose ZWave and then ZigBee.

Broad vs Limited Device Support

“What? My hub supports ZWave. I thought I could use any ZWave device, no problem.”

If only it were so simple. Supported wireless protocols ensure your devices and hub can talk to eachother, but the hub must still know what to do with those signals for specific devices. Just like Windows needs device drivers to know how to use a USB device, a smart home hub needs (effectively) a “driver” that supports your connected device before it can make proper use of it.

“Okay. Cool. Well, I’m guessing all hubs try to offer pretty broad support, right?”

If only it were so, again. While many hubs do try to offer maximum device support, especially for common smart home devices, some hubs choose to limit support to “approved” devices. In theory, these hubs are trying to incubate a more “controlled,” walled garden setup, but in reality they are severely limiting your ability to expand your smart home.

Lowe’s Iris and GE’s Wink are two culprits often criticized for weak device support and limited APIs that prohibit the hobbyist community to expand support independently.

Insteon hubs offer limited support, too, by predominantly focusing on their own wireless protocols instead of embracing the large community of ZWave and ZigBee devices.

Bottom line: If you want the freedom to pick-and-choose your smart home devices, make sure your hub offers broad device support and features an open API that enables others to freely extend the built-in support.

Cloud vs Local Processing

In an effort to provide more powerful computing power at a lower price, some smart home hubs offload their processing to servers in the cloud. The hub in these cases acts as a “dumb” proxy, relaying commands between smart devices in your house and the cloud.

While a powerful option when it works, this approach has the distinct drawback of tying the availability of your smart home to your internet connection. And unless you’re hardwired to 100% reliable internet, that means you can look forward to motion sensors not turning on lights when the internet goes out.

The first version of the Samsung SmartThings and Lowes Iris hubs worked this way. The current second generation hubs operate in a hybrid model, doing some processing in the cloud and some on the hub.

Cloud processing also tends to bring monthly subscription fees with your hub, so be prepared to pay to keep it working. To recap, with cloud processing:

The reliability of your smart home is tied to the reliability of your internet 😳
If the cloud backing your hub does down, so does your house
If you stop paying the subscription fees, your smart home stops working

Bottom line: For a reliable smart home, prefer local processing.

Embedded vs Installed Software

Many smart home hubs come as a packaged unit: the software and hardware are sold together and there is no way to run the software on different hardware.

There are smart home systems, though, that provide the software and let you BYOH. These systems usually install on Windows, Linux or macOS machines, and then you use USB dongles to add the requisite radios for talking to ZWave, ZigBee or whatever devices you want. The advantage of this approach is that you can create a smart home hub that is as powerful as your installation demands, or even reuse an existing always-on computer in your home to power your system.

Embedded systems are certainly more plug-and-play, and typically they are simpler to manage. Think of it as console gaming vs PC gaming. The downside is that these tiny smart home hubs cannot be easily upgrade, and under the covers are usually relatively modest computing capabilities.

Bottom line: If you plan to have a large smart home installation (say, more than 75 to 100 devices), you may prefer the ability to throw more RAM at your smart home hub to keep it running fast as it processes a higher volume of messages, triggers and scenes. In those cases, consider a server-based, installable smart home system.

The Hub Options

https://support.smartthings.com/hc/en-us/articles/205956900

Now that you thoroughly understand some of the key characteristics that make smart home hubs different, let’s see how the options available on the market today compare on these criteria:

	SmartThings (Gen2)	Vera Plus	Iris (v2)	Wink Hub (v2)	HomeKit	HomeSeer	Lutron Caseta	Indigo	Zipato	Fibaro
Supported Protocols:
ZWave	X	X	X	X		X		X	X	X
ZigBee	X	X	X	X		X			X
WiFi	X	X	X	X	X	X	X		X	X
BLE	X	X		X	X	X
Insteon						X		X
Lutron				X		X	X

Extensible/Open API	X	X			X	X		X	X
Local processing	Some	X		Some	X	X	X	X	X	X
Cloud processing	X		X	X
Requires monthly fee			X
Embedded	X	X	X	X	X		X		X	X
Upgradable hardware						X		Runs on Mac	Limited

Pricing	$99	$149	$59	$99	$149	$199+	$59	$300+	$199+	$300+

Clearly, there is lots of choice in today’s market, and though many of these controllers look the same in a simple comparison like this, the devil is in the details. In my experience, the size and vibrancy of the community around a smart home hub is as important as what comes in the box. Smart homes are constantly evolving machines, and active communities help ensure your hub doesn’t fall behind the curve as new devices arrive.

Which hub should you buy

That’s hard to say. There is no definitive right or wrong choice, but if I were to offer “Editor’s Picks,” I’d suggest the following:

For best balance of power and ease of use: Go Vera

For the best out-of-the-box experience: Go SmartThings v2 or Wink v2

For the most control over hardware: Go HomeSeer

What about high-end systems like Savant and Control4

There are a myriad of high-end smart home systems not covered here that are only available via professional installers. These systems are usually put in high-end homes and businesses, and are typically part of new construction (or major remodeling). As a result, costs are typically much higher, too. The focus of this post (and site in general) is more squarely on systems anyone can buy and install.

But yes, there are other high-end options, including Savant, Control4, Elan, and Creston.

ZWave, ZigBee, Bluetooth or Wifi

Fri, 10 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

TODO

Save Your Money: Skip the Hue Lights

Wed, 11 Feb 2015 08:50:00 +0000

Take it from someone that’s bought a BUNCH of Hue Lights that now sit in a box: if you want to build an integrated smart home, skip the Hue Lights. (Or any smart “bulbs” for that matter.)

Unless you are in a rental property where you are unable to make more “permanent” changes, smart bulbs, like the Hue Lights, ultimately introduce so very painful trade-offs:

Your “real” light switches become “off limits”
Your lights do not easily tie-in to your future smart house
It’s a very EXPENSIVE way to make your lighting smart

The Light Switch Problem

TODO

The Smart Home Integration Problem

TODO

The Cost

TODO

Wrap-up

TODO