Smart home and office automation
A smart home, in the view of many, is a single “organism” with its tenants, ensuring their safety, comfort and various amenities for living. At the same time, the individual components of such a home are “invisible” to the users themselves. Approximately, as you do not notice the modern operating system of the smartphone, and you call the necessary application, so the smart home should provide its owners with optimal conditions for spending time with family, meeting with friends or solving everyday tasks. Such a house should create the most comfortable conditions for rest or work, without distraction to household trifles and, at the same time, saving energy consumed.
Obviously, the question arises of how to build such an ideal house or to make your apartment “intellectual”? In fact, the answer is not quite obvious.
For a modern smart building (Smart Building), for example, a business center or office space, the solution of the problem is quite prosaic. The project of such a structure will already include all the components and systems of industrial automation. The presence of a centralized control point for all components of the building, its ecosystem and relations with external services will be taken into account. From a management and monitoring point of view, industrial automation systems, automated process control systems (SCADA / HMI systems) and cloud solutions (Cloud Computing) of major vendors will be used in such a project.
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For the equipment of the digital building system, integrators can easily implement specialized software components that will tie together the structural components of the building. To solve these problems, technologies can be used, for example, Microsoft Azure IoT Suite. At the lower level, specialized actuators and sensors will operate in such industrial automation systems. These systems use standardized industrial protocols to communicate with controllers and then transmit information to the cloud to visualize the processes in the task, archive the data history and execute algorithms that set the parameters of the end devices.
Currently, there are a lot of industrial communication protocols, for example, Modbus, RS-485, Industrial Ethernet, CAN and others, which are supported by their respective controllers. At the same time, due to the standardization of “de facto”, in the field of industrial automation, you can always find a communication interface converter from one network to another. Thus, it is possible to unite the entire network of automation devices at the decision level, for example, Industrial Ethernet. The main thing for such unified systems is the presence of an OPC driver (Open Platform Communications), which will allow the selected SCADA / HMI system to interact with the installed industrial controllers.
A smart building may well be controlled by several SCADA / HMI systems, and not connected to each other. For example, systems: central air conditioning, alarm systems, elevator control, and many other systems may well exist independently. At the same time, such building-level solutions can use publicly accessible Internet channels to access cloud services and, on their basis, can be transformed from a conventional industrial automation network into an intelligent system of a smart building. Moreover, many sensors and actuators, with an additional channel to the Internet, also become part of the cloud. In fact, this is the concept of the Internet of Things, when many devices and systems can interact with the cloud, establishing communications on the basis of it.
But who will take responsibility for the lack of access to the Internet? In fact, industrial automation systems are designed in such a way that in the event of a loss of communication or other breakdowns, an emergency situation protocol must always be executed. For example, without communication with the “outside world”, the actuator must go into a predetermined and pre-programmed mode, even in the event of a loss of electricity in the life support systems of people, a set of measures should always be provided when reacting to such a failure situation.
In turn, a cloud solution, on the example of Microsoft Azure, can be a whole complex consisting of components that interact with each other on the basis of an open API (Application Programming Interface). So information from sensors and smart home systems can be sent to the Microsoft Azure IoT Hub service. This cloud service allows both to receive and transfer control commands to executive devices.
In the case of a periodic lack of communication with the Internet, using the Azure IoT Edge service, you can transfer some of the intellectual properties of the cloud to end devices that can execute software code autonomously and synchronize their data and algorithms to work with the cloud when you resume communication.
In the Microsoft Azure cloud itself, in addition to using data storage services, the flow of information from the IoT Hub can be processed using simple Azure Stream Analytics scripts, which are written in a language similar to the standard SQL query language. At the same time, data flow analysis is performed in real time. The fact is that Microsoft promises very low latency for Stream Analytics services.
Recorded data can be transferred to the Event Hubs service, which is designed to work with telemetry. Here, the data will be ordered and, for example, transmitted using the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) to other data processing services. The Microsoft Azure cloud for Internet of things systems supports the standard messaging protocols Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and the programming of their devices and tasks in universal languages: Java, JavaScript, C, C # and Python.
To visualize data, you can use Microsoft Azure IoT Hub in conjunction with the Power BI business analytics service. The same data that goes to the cloud can be processed using machine learning algorithms, where the user is required to build a data processing algorithm from the user in the Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio environment.
For example, artificial neural network technologies, regression analysis and other similar solutions can be used in the project. The developer is only required to place the necessary block in the diagram. In case something does not work, you can always replace the previously selected block with another one. Thus, truly intelligent algorithms and components are being introduced into the building design.
But this is not all the features of Microsoft Azure, if the developed solution is interesting and replicable, then you can publish it in the Azure Marketplace store and provide other users of this cloud as a ready-made service.
Not only Microsoft provides cloud computing for the Internet of Things technology. You should also pay attention to Amazon's AWS IoT Platform, IBM's Watson IoT cognitive tools and solutions from other vendors. But this is a separate story about the choice of project architecture, the protocols used and the interaction of smart devices of a smart building.
It is necessary to understand that the scale of the considered solutions is enormous, however, as well as their possibilities for the entire ecosystem of a smart building. Of course, such a project will be considerably expensive if it is considered in relation to a private house or apartment. But for a commercial building or a separate innovative construction, these costs are fully justified, especially since the synergistic effect from the introduction of such a system will exceed the investment. But what should an ordinary person, who already wants to get a flexible and intellectual infrastructure for his home and his needs, do now?
By comparing the tasks assigned to the systems of a smart building and a smart home, one can come to the conclusion that for the home the tasks of the systems to be solved will still be more difficult, and the functionality will be more expanded. Perhaps this is the fact that, up to the present, the smart home is rather something unattainable or, more correctly, a difficult task, and we see only rare manifestations of it. All the reasons for this, if you look, lie in the objectives and goals of such a house, as well as its price.
Compared to a commercial building or a room where, before starting operation, it is possible to instruct on safety precautions and features of automated and automatic building systems, this will be much more difficult for a smart home. Usually consumers do not like to deal with the details and learn to use and use their smart electronics intuitively. From the point of view of consumers, as it should be, such an approach is natural, but it is worth noting that only recently systems began to appear that are safe for others and at the same time have a convenient and intuitive interface. Moreover, the inhabitants of a smart home, or rather its rooms, may well become children, pets and nothing unsuspecting guests, and so on.
On the other hand, it should be noted another factor that hinders the rapid development of the components of a smart home - this is the relatively high price of its components. For example, the basis of a smart home is a variety of different electrical and electromechanical systems, information communications, intelligent sensors and actuators, and one should not forget about the computing center or the “cybernetic brain” of a smart home. Of course, the price of such components should be available to many groups of different consumers.
Modern electronics is rapidly developing, which leads in general to cheaper smart home. Literally in a few years, generations of light bulbs have changed: from a conventional incandescent lamp, controlled by a dimmer, to fluorescent housekeepers to LED lamps, and finally to the appearance of smart light bulbs. Such a smart lamp, for example, Philips Hue, Xiaomi LED Ceiling Light or any simpler, is a LED lamp with a conventional base or an entire lighting device, but at the same time there is a controller in this device that controls the luminance: brightness and / or color scheme, depending on the model. But the main thing is that the device is equipped with a built-in controller, which can be connected via standard communication channels: Wi-Fi (802.11), Bluetooth, and control the lamp from your smartphone. But even here, between the smartphone and the lamp, an intermediary or gateway (Gateway) may be needed, which, as in Philips Hue bulbs, from the internal wireless network of ZigBee devices (802.15.4) "forwards" data to the home Wi-Fi router.
Using the simplest example of smart lamps, it becomes clear that designing a smart home is a very difficult task. It all comes down to standards and compatibility. If everything is more or less clear with the standards, because they are well documented, then it would seem that the compatibility of devices via data transmission channels can simply be ensured by the gateway. It allows you to “forward” data packets from one physical network to another, for example, from the same ZigBee network or from the popular specialized network for transmitting Z-Wave control commands developed specifically for solving smart home tasks to a home LAN, for example, built on the basis of wired Ethernet technology and a wireless Wi-Fi router. But at the same time, the main compatibility problem, in fact, lies in the content of the data packets themselves.
If physical communication networks are well documented and standardized, then the internal protocols of the same smart lamps or other devices are de facto implemented and documented within the manufacturer, or even isolated at the level of its one device line. But all is not so bad for the end user. Recently, one can observe a remarkable tendency to open internal protocols for exchanging device data in the form of software APIs. On the basis of such open systems, it is now possible to integrate devices from different suppliers into a single infrastructure of a smart home. Ultimately, all you need to do is download the appropriate application for your smartphone.
Actually, the smartphone becomes the unified information and communication center of the smart home. Some manufacturers, for example, Xiaomi in the Redmi line, often embed an infrared transmitter into a smartphone. This allows you to download a specialized program, connect to the old equipment, which is controlled by the remote control with an infrared signal. After that, a normal TV, stereo or air conditioner can receive commands from a smartphone, the main thing is the presence of a transmitter in the phone and support for the equipment model in a selected program from the Google Play Store or a similar Apple ecosystem solution.
On the other hand, a smartphone can control and interact with modern smart home components that are adapted to work with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and, of course, those that have direct Internet access. The smartphone may well become a kind of sensor. For example, on the basis of determining the location of the owner of a smartphone, the Nest smart thermostat can understand whether the owner is inside the house or already far beyond its borders and, accordingly, adjusts the optimal heating mode to the situation. At the same time, the smartphone does not become indispensable when interacting with intelligent systems. You can always go to the device Nest and change the parameters of its work. It should be noted that these thermostats can interact with compatible devices from other manufacturers, and this is an important feature when forming the infrastructure of a smart home.
It is also quite reasonable to add a Zipato ZipaTile central control panel to the infrastructure of a smart home. Such a panel is a smart home controller, working with various physical interfaces and wireless networks, while the system itself operates on the basis of the Android operating system, actually providing applications for managing the smart home ecosystem. At the same time, if you are inconvenient to use the touch panel as a smart home interface, today you can use the voice control of Google Home, Amazon Alexa, or other vendors.
Modern systems positioned as smart home systems are primarily security solutions: intrusion alarms, video surveillance systems, fire alarms, air quality control systems and various electronic locks. Then it should be noted the comfort system and ensure the environmental and economy of the house: the possibility of using solar energy, wind energy, a system for monitoring the consumption of energy, heat and water. Along with this, a smart home is unlikely to do without comfort systems: a home theater, lighting control systems and smart sockets that can provide on / off mode, for example, ordinary household appliances and other supported appliances. And many others. But all these systems, if they are installed independently of each other, will not interact with each other, so we cannot call such a solution a smart home - these are just Home Automation systems.
By the way, a huge push in the development of home automation systems gave the appearance of Arduino boards. These boards are designed for rapid prototyping of electronic devices. Such a board is a printed circuit board of a certain form factor with a microcontroller sealed on it, the outputs of which are connected to connectors where you can connect expansion cards, for example, controllers of data networks, data recording systems, control elements and similar solutions. Such boards or modules in the Arduino-Shields terminology are available from various vendors due to the fully open design architecture. Also enthusiasts, if they do not find the right Shield, can always develop and solder their solution.
The huge advantage of Arduino was not only the standardization of the device form factor, but also the emergence of a very simple programming language, similar to C / C ++ and a cross-platform development environment created on the basis of the Processing project. If the performance of the Arduino is not enough, for example, to solve the tasks of a home media center, to create a gateway, then you can use the workings of another open project, but on the basis of an ARM processor. This is a well-known project Raspberry Pi, where the operating system on the Linux kernel or a modified version of Android, as well as the Microsoft Windows 10 IoT Core operating system and others can already work.
On the basis of the Arduino, it is possible to build an intelligent sensor or create an intelligent control device. The idea of such constructions is that the microcontroller receives data from the sensitive element of the sensor or is connected to control systems, for example, relays and the like. Unlike simple sensors and actuators, intelligent systems can execute their program. Such intelligent sensors or control devices should not only work according to external commands, but also carry out a pre-programmed set of actions in case of an emergency situation when the communication link is broken.
In addition, it should be noted that in the development of home automation systems, one should always consider the mechanisms of the behavior of subsystems and components during an emergency power outage. Obviously, the logic of the intelligent control systems should provide for any abnormal situations. Such cases should be foreseen in the system in advance and should be approached to the implementation of safety measures not from the standpoint of an emergency situation, but a standard device operation that guarantees certain safety and reliability measures.
As already noted, DIY or DIY solutions contribute to the rapid development of home automation systems. It should not be forgotten that, unlike certified products, which can only be used in regulated operating conditions, for developing prototypes it is necessary to have skills and knowledge in the field of electronics, electrical systems and observe all safety measures.
Components like the Arduino are shipped as is, with no guarantee and no risk to consumers. By commissioning our own development based on such decisions, it is possible to adversely affect the well-being of your home, your life and those around you, if you do not take the necessary safety measures and perceive such systems, namely, as prototypes of products. Next, you should take care of the reliability and safety of the resulting sample, which can be a commercial product, for example, many successful modern startups.
So, home automation is now, more than ever, at the peak of the development and improvement of its consumer systems, but in fact such projects always solve problems at the level of a particular smart home system or its individual component. And here, unlike the tasks of a smart building, a smart home does not need to support too complex calculations and algorithms to ensure the interaction of all components of the project. You can do with the resources of a small home server.
It is easy to follow the trend in building centralized systems of a smart home, where each intelligent sensor or actuator is connected to the main node or hub (Hub). For example, you can select popular open projects: OpenHAB, Domoticz, MajorDoMo and others, the essence of which boils down to the fact that the smart home server is deployed in the room and the interaction of the components of the entire smart home ecosystem is based on it. Moreover, such a hub can itself be quite an intelligent device, and in case of a lack of computing resources, you can always rent third-party cloud services and services, for example, cognitive services, machine learning, and others.
If you look at the trends in the development of the concept of smart building and the improvement of the Internet of Things, it immediately becomes obvious that now every component, system, sensor or actuator is virtually unthinkable without going online. At the same time, there is a clear tendency to reject centralization of management and to delegate the solution of problems of interaction between smart home systems in a cloud computing environment. Here, just lies the synergy of the components of a smart home. For example, when using the MQTT protocol, all systems will transmit messages, and those interested in certain data will subscribe to the messages they need and, on the basis of this information, make decisions that contribute to a balanced “life” of the digital home. Thus, it can be argued about the transformation of home automation systems into a smart home based on the use of the Internet of Things technology.
So far, such systems are just beginning to be developed and improved, but there is no doubt that they have very great potential in terms of facilitating the construction of smart solutions. At the same time, users of the system will not need to write many programs. By the principle of downloading from the virtual store of programs for a smartphone, it will be possible to “download” and use the required software for your system, adapting it to the solution of its tasks, getting all the advantages of digital technologies of the smart home.
Have you tried home automation systems? Do you have your own successful experience in building a smart home or are you an expert on smart building technologies? Interesting, and maybe, on the contrary - any parts of this publication are incomprehensible? Share your opinions and thoughts in the comments.
Obviously, the question arises of how to build such an ideal house or to make your apartment “intellectual”? In fact, the answer is not quite obvious.
Digital ecosystem of smart building
For a modern smart building (Smart Building), for example, a business center or office space, the solution of the problem is quite prosaic. The project of such a structure will already include all the components and systems of industrial automation. The presence of a centralized control point for all components of the building, its ecosystem and relations with external services will be taken into account. From a management and monitoring point of view, industrial automation systems, automated process control systems (SCADA / HMI systems) and cloud solutions (Cloud Computing) of major vendors will be used in such a project.
')
For the equipment of the digital building system, integrators can easily implement specialized software components that will tie together the structural components of the building. To solve these problems, technologies can be used, for example, Microsoft Azure IoT Suite. At the lower level, specialized actuators and sensors will operate in such industrial automation systems. These systems use standardized industrial protocols to communicate with controllers and then transmit information to the cloud to visualize the processes in the task, archive the data history and execute algorithms that set the parameters of the end devices.
Currently, there are a lot of industrial communication protocols, for example, Modbus, RS-485, Industrial Ethernet, CAN and others, which are supported by their respective controllers. At the same time, due to the standardization of “de facto”, in the field of industrial automation, you can always find a communication interface converter from one network to another. Thus, it is possible to unite the entire network of automation devices at the decision level, for example, Industrial Ethernet. The main thing for such unified systems is the presence of an OPC driver (Open Platform Communications), which will allow the selected SCADA / HMI system to interact with the installed industrial controllers.
A smart building may well be controlled by several SCADA / HMI systems, and not connected to each other. For example, systems: central air conditioning, alarm systems, elevator control, and many other systems may well exist independently. At the same time, such building-level solutions can use publicly accessible Internet channels to access cloud services and, on their basis, can be transformed from a conventional industrial automation network into an intelligent system of a smart building. Moreover, many sensors and actuators, with an additional channel to the Internet, also become part of the cloud. In fact, this is the concept of the Internet of Things, when many devices and systems can interact with the cloud, establishing communications on the basis of it.
But who will take responsibility for the lack of access to the Internet? In fact, industrial automation systems are designed in such a way that in the event of a loss of communication or other breakdowns, an emergency situation protocol must always be executed. For example, without communication with the “outside world”, the actuator must go into a predetermined and pre-programmed mode, even in the event of a loss of electricity in the life support systems of people, a set of measures should always be provided when reacting to such a failure situation.
In turn, a cloud solution, on the example of Microsoft Azure, can be a whole complex consisting of components that interact with each other on the basis of an open API (Application Programming Interface). So information from sensors and smart home systems can be sent to the Microsoft Azure IoT Hub service. This cloud service allows both to receive and transfer control commands to executive devices.
In the case of a periodic lack of communication with the Internet, using the Azure IoT Edge service, you can transfer some of the intellectual properties of the cloud to end devices that can execute software code autonomously and synchronize their data and algorithms to work with the cloud when you resume communication.
In the Microsoft Azure cloud itself, in addition to using data storage services, the flow of information from the IoT Hub can be processed using simple Azure Stream Analytics scripts, which are written in a language similar to the standard SQL query language. At the same time, data flow analysis is performed in real time. The fact is that Microsoft promises very low latency for Stream Analytics services.
Recorded data can be transferred to the Event Hubs service, which is designed to work with telemetry. Here, the data will be ordered and, for example, transmitted using the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) to other data processing services. The Microsoft Azure cloud for Internet of things systems supports the standard messaging protocols Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and the programming of their devices and tasks in universal languages: Java, JavaScript, C, C # and Python.
To visualize data, you can use Microsoft Azure IoT Hub in conjunction with the Power BI business analytics service. The same data that goes to the cloud can be processed using machine learning algorithms, where the user is required to build a data processing algorithm from the user in the Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio environment.
For example, artificial neural network technologies, regression analysis and other similar solutions can be used in the project. The developer is only required to place the necessary block in the diagram. In case something does not work, you can always replace the previously selected block with another one. Thus, truly intelligent algorithms and components are being introduced into the building design.
But this is not all the features of Microsoft Azure, if the developed solution is interesting and replicable, then you can publish it in the Azure Marketplace store and provide other users of this cloud as a ready-made service.
Not only Microsoft provides cloud computing for the Internet of Things technology. You should also pay attention to Amazon's AWS IoT Platform, IBM's Watson IoT cognitive tools and solutions from other vendors. But this is a separate story about the choice of project architecture, the protocols used and the interaction of smart devices of a smart building.
It is necessary to understand that the scale of the considered solutions is enormous, however, as well as their possibilities for the entire ecosystem of a smart building. Of course, such a project will be considerably expensive if it is considered in relation to a private house or apartment. But for a commercial building or a separate innovative construction, these costs are fully justified, especially since the synergistic effect from the introduction of such a system will exceed the investment. But what should an ordinary person, who already wants to get a flexible and intellectual infrastructure for his home and his needs, do now?
Prospects for the concept of smart home
By comparing the tasks assigned to the systems of a smart building and a smart home, one can come to the conclusion that for the home the tasks of the systems to be solved will still be more difficult, and the functionality will be more expanded. Perhaps this is the fact that, up to the present, the smart home is rather something unattainable or, more correctly, a difficult task, and we see only rare manifestations of it. All the reasons for this, if you look, lie in the objectives and goals of such a house, as well as its price.
Compared to a commercial building or a room where, before starting operation, it is possible to instruct on safety precautions and features of automated and automatic building systems, this will be much more difficult for a smart home. Usually consumers do not like to deal with the details and learn to use and use their smart electronics intuitively. From the point of view of consumers, as it should be, such an approach is natural, but it is worth noting that only recently systems began to appear that are safe for others and at the same time have a convenient and intuitive interface. Moreover, the inhabitants of a smart home, or rather its rooms, may well become children, pets and nothing unsuspecting guests, and so on.
On the other hand, it should be noted another factor that hinders the rapid development of the components of a smart home - this is the relatively high price of its components. For example, the basis of a smart home is a variety of different electrical and electromechanical systems, information communications, intelligent sensors and actuators, and one should not forget about the computing center or the “cybernetic brain” of a smart home. Of course, the price of such components should be available to many groups of different consumers.
Modern electronics is rapidly developing, which leads in general to cheaper smart home. Literally in a few years, generations of light bulbs have changed: from a conventional incandescent lamp, controlled by a dimmer, to fluorescent housekeepers to LED lamps, and finally to the appearance of smart light bulbs. Such a smart lamp, for example, Philips Hue, Xiaomi LED Ceiling Light or any simpler, is a LED lamp with a conventional base or an entire lighting device, but at the same time there is a controller in this device that controls the luminance: brightness and / or color scheme, depending on the model. But the main thing is that the device is equipped with a built-in controller, which can be connected via standard communication channels: Wi-Fi (802.11), Bluetooth, and control the lamp from your smartphone. But even here, between the smartphone and the lamp, an intermediary or gateway (Gateway) may be needed, which, as in Philips Hue bulbs, from the internal wireless network of ZigBee devices (802.15.4) "forwards" data to the home Wi-Fi router.
Using the simplest example of smart lamps, it becomes clear that designing a smart home is a very difficult task. It all comes down to standards and compatibility. If everything is more or less clear with the standards, because they are well documented, then it would seem that the compatibility of devices via data transmission channels can simply be ensured by the gateway. It allows you to “forward” data packets from one physical network to another, for example, from the same ZigBee network or from the popular specialized network for transmitting Z-Wave control commands developed specifically for solving smart home tasks to a home LAN, for example, built on the basis of wired Ethernet technology and a wireless Wi-Fi router. But at the same time, the main compatibility problem, in fact, lies in the content of the data packets themselves.
If physical communication networks are well documented and standardized, then the internal protocols of the same smart lamps or other devices are de facto implemented and documented within the manufacturer, or even isolated at the level of its one device line. But all is not so bad for the end user. Recently, one can observe a remarkable tendency to open internal protocols for exchanging device data in the form of software APIs. On the basis of such open systems, it is now possible to integrate devices from different suppliers into a single infrastructure of a smart home. Ultimately, all you need to do is download the appropriate application for your smartphone.
Actually, the smartphone becomes the unified information and communication center of the smart home. Some manufacturers, for example, Xiaomi in the Redmi line, often embed an infrared transmitter into a smartphone. This allows you to download a specialized program, connect to the old equipment, which is controlled by the remote control with an infrared signal. After that, a normal TV, stereo or air conditioner can receive commands from a smartphone, the main thing is the presence of a transmitter in the phone and support for the equipment model in a selected program from the Google Play Store or a similar Apple ecosystem solution.
On the other hand, a smartphone can control and interact with modern smart home components that are adapted to work with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and, of course, those that have direct Internet access. The smartphone may well become a kind of sensor. For example, on the basis of determining the location of the owner of a smartphone, the Nest smart thermostat can understand whether the owner is inside the house or already far beyond its borders and, accordingly, adjusts the optimal heating mode to the situation. At the same time, the smartphone does not become indispensable when interacting with intelligent systems. You can always go to the device Nest and change the parameters of its work. It should be noted that these thermostats can interact with compatible devices from other manufacturers, and this is an important feature when forming the infrastructure of a smart home.
It is also quite reasonable to add a Zipato ZipaTile central control panel to the infrastructure of a smart home. Such a panel is a smart home controller, working with various physical interfaces and wireless networks, while the system itself operates on the basis of the Android operating system, actually providing applications for managing the smart home ecosystem. At the same time, if you are inconvenient to use the touch panel as a smart home interface, today you can use the voice control of Google Home, Amazon Alexa, or other vendors.
Modern systems positioned as smart home systems are primarily security solutions: intrusion alarms, video surveillance systems, fire alarms, air quality control systems and various electronic locks. Then it should be noted the comfort system and ensure the environmental and economy of the house: the possibility of using solar energy, wind energy, a system for monitoring the consumption of energy, heat and water. Along with this, a smart home is unlikely to do without comfort systems: a home theater, lighting control systems and smart sockets that can provide on / off mode, for example, ordinary household appliances and other supported appliances. And many others. But all these systems, if they are installed independently of each other, will not interact with each other, so we cannot call such a solution a smart home - these are just Home Automation systems.
By the way, a huge push in the development of home automation systems gave the appearance of Arduino boards. These boards are designed for rapid prototyping of electronic devices. Such a board is a printed circuit board of a certain form factor with a microcontroller sealed on it, the outputs of which are connected to connectors where you can connect expansion cards, for example, controllers of data networks, data recording systems, control elements and similar solutions. Such boards or modules in the Arduino-Shields terminology are available from various vendors due to the fully open design architecture. Also enthusiasts, if they do not find the right Shield, can always develop and solder their solution.
The huge advantage of Arduino was not only the standardization of the device form factor, but also the emergence of a very simple programming language, similar to C / C ++ and a cross-platform development environment created on the basis of the Processing project. If the performance of the Arduino is not enough, for example, to solve the tasks of a home media center, to create a gateway, then you can use the workings of another open project, but on the basis of an ARM processor. This is a well-known project Raspberry Pi, where the operating system on the Linux kernel or a modified version of Android, as well as the Microsoft Windows 10 IoT Core operating system and others can already work.
On the basis of the Arduino, it is possible to build an intelligent sensor or create an intelligent control device. The idea of such constructions is that the microcontroller receives data from the sensitive element of the sensor or is connected to control systems, for example, relays and the like. Unlike simple sensors and actuators, intelligent systems can execute their program. Such intelligent sensors or control devices should not only work according to external commands, but also carry out a pre-programmed set of actions in case of an emergency situation when the communication link is broken.
In addition, it should be noted that in the development of home automation systems, one should always consider the mechanisms of the behavior of subsystems and components during an emergency power outage. Obviously, the logic of the intelligent control systems should provide for any abnormal situations. Such cases should be foreseen in the system in advance and should be approached to the implementation of safety measures not from the standpoint of an emergency situation, but a standard device operation that guarantees certain safety and reliability measures.
As already noted, DIY or DIY solutions contribute to the rapid development of home automation systems. It should not be forgotten that, unlike certified products, which can only be used in regulated operating conditions, for developing prototypes it is necessary to have skills and knowledge in the field of electronics, electrical systems and observe all safety measures.
Components like the Arduino are shipped as is, with no guarantee and no risk to consumers. By commissioning our own development based on such decisions, it is possible to adversely affect the well-being of your home, your life and those around you, if you do not take the necessary safety measures and perceive such systems, namely, as prototypes of products. Next, you should take care of the reliability and safety of the resulting sample, which can be a commercial product, for example, many successful modern startups.
So, home automation is now, more than ever, at the peak of the development and improvement of its consumer systems, but in fact such projects always solve problems at the level of a particular smart home system or its individual component. And here, unlike the tasks of a smart building, a smart home does not need to support too complex calculations and algorithms to ensure the interaction of all components of the project. You can do with the resources of a small home server.
It is easy to follow the trend in building centralized systems of a smart home, where each intelligent sensor or actuator is connected to the main node or hub (Hub). For example, you can select popular open projects: OpenHAB, Domoticz, MajorDoMo and others, the essence of which boils down to the fact that the smart home server is deployed in the room and the interaction of the components of the entire smart home ecosystem is based on it. Moreover, such a hub can itself be quite an intelligent device, and in case of a lack of computing resources, you can always rent third-party cloud services and services, for example, cognitive services, machine learning, and others.
If you look at the trends in the development of the concept of smart building and the improvement of the Internet of Things, it immediately becomes obvious that now every component, system, sensor or actuator is virtually unthinkable without going online. At the same time, there is a clear tendency to reject centralization of management and to delegate the solution of problems of interaction between smart home systems in a cloud computing environment. Here, just lies the synergy of the components of a smart home. For example, when using the MQTT protocol, all systems will transmit messages, and those interested in certain data will subscribe to the messages they need and, on the basis of this information, make decisions that contribute to a balanced “life” of the digital home. Thus, it can be argued about the transformation of home automation systems into a smart home based on the use of the Internet of Things technology.
So far, such systems are just beginning to be developed and improved, but there is no doubt that they have very great potential in terms of facilitating the construction of smart solutions. At the same time, users of the system will not need to write many programs. By the principle of downloading from the virtual store of programs for a smartphone, it will be possible to “download” and use the required software for your system, adapting it to the solution of its tasks, getting all the advantages of digital technologies of the smart home.
Have you tried home automation systems? Do you have your own successful experience in building a smart home or are you an expert on smart building technologies? Interesting, and maybe, on the contrary - any parts of this publication are incomprehensible? Share your opinions and thoughts in the comments.
Interesting resources and links:
- Architectural IOT for Smart Buildings: Deep dive into Microsoft's first energy energy smart buildings - Channel 9
- Greener Planet - Microsoft Customer Stories
- Microsoft Azure IoT Suite - Microsoft IoT Cloud Solution
- How the AWS IoT Platform Works - Amazon Web Services
- Watson Internet of Things - IBM
- Inside an Apple smart home - TechCrunch
- Philips Hue LED Wi-Fi Bulb Review - THG.ru
- Nest - Third Generation Learning Thermostat - PCMag Russian Edition
- Zipato ZipaTile smart home control system - iXBT.com
- How to build an Arduino powered smart home - CodeProject
- 11 DIY Projects to Turn Your House Into a Smart Home - Gizmodo
- Comparing Google Home and Amazon Alexa - Geektimes
- 9 Home Automation Open-Source Platforms for Your Projects - Random Nerd Tutorials
- Business Insider
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/373809/
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