A lot of people as us what our smart home consists of but there is no quick answer to this question, so we wrote this page:
Physically, our smart home consists of a low power Linux PC running our own smart home software. This is powered via a Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) to keep it running for several days without power. The UPS also powers the essential wired networking components, a Z-Wave gateway and a 12V dc power network for a number of slave processors and cameras. In total there are 400+ sensors and 100+ IP-network devices and appliances. Most of the lighting in our home is smart but we only have a handful of smart bulbs and smart switches. Our smart home is also our alarm covering both safety and security. It has a strobe, internal sounder and external sounder. It can also send notifications and make localised and whole home voice announcements.
Our smart home uses an Internet connection to collect useful information and data, to improve the way it works but it doesn't need an Internet connection to operate. All the key features work without one.
All of the hardware is kind of irrelevant though, our smart home is all about a great user experience. And this is why we have developed a lot of it ourselves, so we get exactly the user interfaces we want. The power of the smart home lies within the software behind it and this is what we have spent most of our time developing. Our goal is the home equivalent of a self-driving car. We want a fully autonomous smart home that just knows what to do and when. This is only possible by modelling the home and having a real-time view of ALL the data and context. This means that we must also keep this extremely sensitive data private and none of it is shared with 3rd parties (unless we want to).
It means our smart home knows things like if we are in, out or away on holiday automatically. It knows who is at home and which rooms are occupied. It sees things like showers being used, people in toilets and bathrooms. It sees our home network and tracks every device connected and in use.
It can use this information to adapt and control everything within it including the security system, cameras, heating, lighting, etc. It also pulls in information from 3rd party feeds such as environmental and weather data. It can then use this information and context to do things like intelligent irrigation.
When you smart home becomes truly smart, it feels like you have someone looking after you. This is why we have given our smart home an identity along with text and voice interfaces to communicate with it. We can query and control all aspects of our smart home via our AI which uses natural language processing.
Smart home is a journey and we have been on ours for over 15 years. You can't buy a complete solution in one go to an evolving problem. People's needs change, technology changes, even your home changes. We have designed our smart home to work in any building with some simple configuration and have used a smart home building blocks approach to make it easy to do very powerful things simply. We have also designed it to be easily installed, extended and configured.
