Startup WigWag creates an environment for programming smart home in JavaScript

Today, different manufacturers offer dozens of different (and often incompatible) systems, devices, applications, and interfaces to turn an ordinary house or apartment into a smart one — smart door locks and lights with WiFi control, sockets, sensors and switches with a Twitter account. , Internet refrigerators air conditioners. Startup WigWag , which has already raised almost four times more money than it had planned on Kickstarter, approached the issue of creating a smart home more systematically. They offer not just a set of sensors and actuators, but also a whole infrastructure that is compatible with many of the already existing intelligent electrical appliances, and, more importantly, open to modifications and friendly to both ordinary users and programmers and hackers.

WigWag allows you to create "rules", like IFTTT recipes , that can control any device based on information from sensors or from the Internet. These can be WigWag sensors and actuators, Internet services, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Belkin WeMo, Philips Hue, and any other protocols that support IP, RS-232, 6loWPAN, Bluetooth and Zigbee. Moreover, it is possible to create rules not only through a graphical interface, but also in JavaScript, using the DeviceJS runtime, which WigWag developers are positioning as a way to write applications for a smart home in the same way as writing applications for the Web.



The developers promise to publish all the drawings and specifications of the devices, the source code and the DeviceJS API on GitHub. The “iron” part of the WigWag consists of three components. The first one is a universal multisensor actuator, which has temperature, humidity, sound, vibration, movement, light sensors, a mechanical contact sensor, and several communication channels with the outside world, serving both for receiving signals from outside and for controlling other devices — the relay , infrared emitter, digital and analogue inputs-outputs for connecting external sensors, LED and buzzer for signaling. For power are four AA batteries or microUSB connector. The second component is the LED strip with a controller having its own sensors for the level of illumination and movement. The third is a base station that connects to the Internet and supports wireless communication with other components and other compatible devices.
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Here is a sample list of what WigWag can do:



WigWag cloud services allow you to manage devices from anywhere in the world through a web interface. At the same time, at the local level, the system can work without access to the Internet - the base station will follow all the rules specified for the devices connected to it without the help of the cloud.

The DeviceJS environment will be based on Node.js and V8. The DeviceJS API will be built in the image and likeness of the most familiar to most web programmers libraries, such as jQuery or d3.js. This is how an API call for red lights in the kitchen might look like:

dev$.byLocation("kitchen").setColor("red"); 

But turning on the light in the corridor when the motion detector is triggered:

 dev$.byDeviceAlias('hallway-sensor').trigger('motion', function() { dev$.byLocation('hallway').setOn(); }); 

In addition to off-the-shelf components, WigWag offers boards for the independent creation of compatible devices based on Arduino and Raspberry Pi.