Create your own smart home

Home automation used to be the bastion of luxury penthouses, hobbyist hackers and Bill Gates, but pervasive internet access and cheaper equipment means that anyone can now switch their heating on with a swipe of their smartphone.

The Tomorrow’s World smart home revolved around talking fridges that spare you a trip to the supermarket, but the technology that’s made it to market is less concerned with gimmickry, and instead focused on more pressing needs: reducing energy bills, improving security and connecting entertainment media.

In this feature, we’re going to reveal how the concept of the smart home is now tantalisingly close to an affordable, mainstream reality.

We’ll show how many pieces are falling together to create connected homes that have long been out of reach to all but a few dedicated enthusiasts.

Plus, we’ll show how you can start to benefit from smart-home technology right away, with a selection of gadgets and services that will add a touch of automated magic to your home.

The next big thing

Industry evangelists believe the smart home, and by extension devices within it, will be the next key growth area for consumer electronics.

“It’s a similar journey that we took from dial-up to broadband to IPTV and everything else, and we’re in the same place now,” says Mary Turner, CEO of AlertMe, a smart-home technology provider backed by British Gas. “This isn’t about green tech or saving money, this is about the internet – it was about communication to begin with, then engaging with content, and in the third phase it’s about engaging and interacting with your home – it’s about the internet growing up.”

Smart-home companies foresee a world where a central hub plugged into routers puts consumers in complete control of their homes from anywhere.

Key fobs will tell the system when you leave home, switching off lights, activating locks and turning down the heating. Connected devices such as thermostats, security cameras and washing machines will be controlled from a smartphone app so that consumers can alter settings remotely, monitor rooms, turn lights on or pop the oven on for tonight’s Sloppy Giuseppe.

At its heart, the smart home is the logical extension of “the internet of things”, with devices interacting with a central account that consumers can manage from anywhere.

The near-ubiquitous ownership of smartphones is accelerating the smart-home surge, overcoming the expensive route of a professional fitting a proprietary set of equipment.

“Mobile has a big influence on consumer behaviour when it comes to home management platforms,” says Greg Roberts, vice president for iControl, a software developer that’s launched smart services in Europe via Swiss ISP Swisscom. “Tablets and mobiles enable the apps we develop to make it easy for end users to control or automate their home. A web portal means people can do things from anywhere.

“We have standardised a platform on open protocols: one being ZigBee, which is the wireless protocol that talks to the gateway and machines, but the system also uses Wi-Fi, and can talk to Wi-Fi cameras,” Roberts says. “Since it’s based on standards, hundreds of manufacturers are building things here – especially home health and home management.”

There are now dozens of apps that control connected devices in the home. MobiLinc, for example, is an iPhone app that uses any wireless connection to control up to 1,024 devices using the Insteon or X10 protocols.

The company boasts that the app “controls all of your lights, thermostats, devices, programs and irrigation system while on vacation or away from home”. The app also provides access to real-time information from the house’s devices, so any changes in readings can be acted upon.

It’s the sort of controller that prompted Google to launch its Android@Home project last year, touting Android phones as the logical controller for connected households. “We’d like to think of your entire home as an accessory,” Google’s Joe Britt said at the launch. “Android is the operating system for your home.”

The company’s purchase of Motorola has also been cited as evidence of plans in the home space, and the company has even announced plans for a connected lightbulb, which uses the GPS in your smartphone to switch the lights on and off as you walk in and out of rooms, for example.

Standards lottery

The downside of such apps is that they won’t work with every system, and with an array of rival protocols and platforms, end users face a typical early adopter dilemma – which is the Betamax of the smart-home world?

The smart home has been one of those ‘next big things’ for years, but has been held back by a lack of standardisation

The smart home has been one of those “next big things” for years, but has been held back by a lack of standardisation, and devices that can’t talk to each other. X10, ZigBee, Z-Wave, Insteon and Universal Powerline Bus all have advocates among home networkers, and while some systems are compatible, others aren’t.

“The internet of things is a great concept, and in my mind this is all about connecting things together. That’s the single biggest challenge – at the moment it’s too hard,” says Gary Atkinson, ARM’s marketing director for embedded chips. “Anything that’s connected via ZigBee still needs to be paired, and it seems to take an age for these things to connect to each other.

“We’ve seen tremendous advances in app development due to smartphones. People know you can write an app, connect to a web API and get a working platform together pretty quickly, but adding hardware to those platforms is still a major challenge,” he adds. “There’s still no core central tenant of standardisation such as TCP/IP or HTML5 that people can get behind, and that’s slowing home automation down.”

DIY competitors

In the UK DIY market, two main competing systems vie for attention, with the ageing X10 protocol supporting a greater number of devices, but the Z-Wave protocol, which uses wireless communication instead of X10’s power lines, the newer kid on the block.

“X10 is very easy to put in and get going, with a lot of modules out there for switches and sensors,” says Ivor Evans, director of uk-automation.co.uk, one of several sites selling equipment for DIY smart-home builders. “Z-Wave is newer, so there isn’t as wide a selection of bits and pieces, but there are more coming out.”

Home kits can control everything from garage doors and sprinklers to pet feeders and baby monitors. However, Evans warned that users should beware of trying to hop between systems, and avoid imports from the US, which aren’t compatible.

“If you pick a standard, you tend to choose one or the other – you don’t mix and match,” he says. “People get the idea they can buy-in X10 and Z-Wave products from the US, but you can’t, partly because of the voltage problem, and partly because the frequencies are different for Z-Wave. You can’t buy cheap kit in America and make it work over here.”

With starter kits, including sensors and controllers, from £130 for X10 systems, or £320 for Z-Wave, the smart home no longer requires a banker’s bonus to deploy. “The beauty is that they’re expandable from a small starting point. You don’t need a load of wiring through your property, and you can expand when you want to or can afford it,” Evans says.

Despite the issues with standards, there are precedents that have helped with entertainment distribution, and similar initiatives could bring the connected home closer.

“If we could get something like the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) for home networking, it would be an improvement,” says ARM’s Atkinson, who worked on the project when at Intel. “One of the elements was about getting devices to talk to one another and declare ‘I have content you can play’.

“It’s been successful, and a PlayStation, Xbox or Blu-ray player all understand DLNA, so you can turn on a new TV and it has access to your PC hard drive. If you can do that for home automation, you start to get somewhere.”

The smart meter in the middle

While the standards war threatens to stunt the spread of smart homes, an unlikely potential saviour has emerged – energy providers that want to push smart meters into homes. Experts believe that intelligent thermostats and meters could act like a trojan horse, allowing other devices to hook off the same hardware.

“They [energy suppliers] have infrastructure to supply the country with energy, but at peak times they have to fire up hugely expensive gas turbines to meet peak demand – and they have to invest extra money in backup equipment,” says Atkinson. “The energy companies want to smooth out the peaks and troughs of demand because it will save them a lot of money.

The energy companies want to smooth out the peaks and troughs of demand because it will save them a lot of money

“If I’m cooking tea, the TV’s on, the dishwasher kicks in and the tumble dryer’s going, I could be running 6kW of power. Now if I get a signal from my utility company to a box that controls devices, they can turn them off. If a freezer is switched off for 15 minutes, or the tumble dryer heat cuts for 20 minutes, does it make a difference? No.”

Smart moves

Replicated across the country such a system could make a significant difference, which is why the Government and energy companies are so keen on the “smart meters” they hope to push into every home, although recently stepped back from making them compulsory.

Indeed, the first partner for AlertMe’s intelligent-monitoring kit looks likely to come from its links with British Gas, which in 2010 bought a stake in the company.

AlertMe, which will work with ZigBee, Wi-Fi and Z-Wave, says that eventually anything that talks to a central hub will be connectable, becoming more like wireless routers – plug-and-play devices that work agnostically with connectable modules.

“Look at the market: people make certain appliances, but it’s proprietary and things don’t all work together,” says Turner. “In my home I have 30 connectable items, and I’m going to have 30 different interfaces to control any of that stuff. You can make an item connectable with a small tile so it can talk back to the hub.”

AlertMe has signed a deal with Invensys, which supplies hundreds of thousands of British Gas homes with heating controllers, to include a ZigBee chip within thermostats that will talk to the central hub.

Many of these hubs are likely to be little more than ZigBee-to-Ethernet converters, but once they’re installed there’s nothing preventing other manufacturers from hopping onto the system.

“This is a rapidly growing part of the business – very small, specific microprocessors – the things that live in sensors, ZigBee radios, tags, infrared sensors for movement, heat sensors, humidity sensors, gyroscopes that could be used to trigger something based on movement; they’re pretty much all based on ARM-based processors,” says Atkinson. “Anything connected by ZigBee could be connected to that hub, and would then talk directly to the internet via a central portal where you could gather all devices together.”

Pretty soon it won’t be bill-paying parents asking their kids to keep an eye on the meter; it will be the meter keeping an eye on you.