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Dueling Home Automation Systems at SXSW (Video)
Austin has a strong western heritage and more country and western music than you can shake a fiddle bow at. So when Timothy came back from SXSW with video clips from two home automation companies with different approaches to this question: "How can you work with a whole bunch of lights and thermostats and other IoT home automation pieces that all have different OSes and control APIs?" we obviously had to call the resulting video 'Dueling Home Automation Systems.'
The two companies shown in this video are called WigWag and Yonomi. WigWag sells you a "Relay," which they say "is a powerful mini computer that gives you control of your home's smart devices." The minimum pre-order buy-in for WigWag seems to be a $149 WigWag Relay. Their 'products' page his page shows the Relay -- and many other gadgets and kits that could easily run your total tab up to $1000 or more. Yonomi, on the other hand, "resides on your phone and in the Cloud. No need for a hub, controller box or other additional hardware. Yonomi magically finds and enhances your existing connected devices allowing them to interact with one another in ways never before possible."
Yonomi may start with a free Android app (iOS coming soon), but you still need to buy lights, speakers, thermostats, and other things that are Internet-aware, so you're not going to save much (if anything) over buying a WigWag relay and the rest of what you need to create your own, private Internet of Things. And what about good old X10 and other home control systems? They're still out there, still doing their thing in millions of homes even if they aren't getting all the IoT buzz. In any case, it's nice to see new home automation alternatives coming down the pike, even if their cloudness may make them easier to hack than an old-fashioned appliance like this coffeemaker.
The two companies shown in this video are called WigWag and Yonomi. WigWag sells you a "Relay," which they say "is a powerful mini computer that gives you control of your home's smart devices." The minimum pre-order buy-in for WigWag seems to be a $149 WigWag Relay. Their 'products' page his page shows the Relay -- and many other gadgets and kits that could easily run your total tab up to $1000 or more. Yonomi, on the other hand, "resides on your phone and in the Cloud. No need for a hub, controller box or other additional hardware. Yonomi magically finds and enhances your existing connected devices allowing them to interact with one another in ways never before possible."
Yonomi may start with a free Android app (iOS coming soon), but you still need to buy lights, speakers, thermostats, and other things that are Internet-aware, so you're not going to save much (if anything) over buying a WigWag relay and the rest of what you need to create your own, private Internet of Things. And what about good old X10 and other home control systems? They're still out there, still doing their thing in millions of homes even if they aren't getting all the IoT buzz. In any case, it's nice to see new home automation alternatives coming down the pike, even if their cloudness may make them easier to hack than an old-fashioned appliance like this coffeemaker.
...to quote the character Penny from The Big Bang Theory, "or we could just have a life."
I'm sure there are those that disagree with me, but automation for its own sake does not achieve anything. There are lots of things that people fantasize about automating that simply cannot be automated with the current designs of the appliances themselves. The best that you're going to get for laundry will be a notification that it's time to move it from one machine to another for example, and that can be handled with a simple buzzer in the machine. Your refrigerator and pantry aren't going to be able to notify you about bulk goods or other fresh/raw ingredients when their inventories get low since those ingredients don't have means to affix RFID tags or other identifiers to them, even if such gets applied to prepackaged goods.
We're not really there yet for home automation. We've tried it before; I have a house built in the seventies with a whole-house intercom system; but such technology ends up abandoned even if it's still functional.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The problem with these gadgets is that they're too small and proprietary to be taken seriously. Home Depot and Lowes both have competing products with different standards for example. Then there is a host of competing companies that do the same thing. Some use power line communications, some use custom 700MHz, 2.4 or 5GHz spectrum which all may interfere with each other, WiFi and other things.
There are open standards for this kind of stuff, some may be less open than others but at least they're available. Give me a 'gateway' or hub that I can replace myself with a custom implementation on a computer. I'd trust Linux/Mac, heck even Windows over one of these devices.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
If you don't have a hub, or if you are using your mobile phone as one, then you don't have home automation but integrated remote control only. You need a hub to build some intelligence into the system, and have it work for other members of the household as well as yourself, and have it work when you are not at home. A mobile phone makes for a great way to remotely control your smart home, but a good smart home works without it. I use my phone for remote access, but for day to day stuff when I am at home I prefer dedicated remotes and switches.
And the cloud? This stuff needs to remain private and has no place in the cloud. Another good reason to do HA using a hub that you own and control.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Like another earlier poster, I still consider home automation to be a hobby, especially after trying it enthusiastically for a while. Reason being: It's expensive, it takes a lot of time, it's buggy and it's not necessary. But it can be fun if you're willing to deal with the downsides.
The big power-user product for home automation control is a very powerful piece of software called homeseer. If you're really serious about it and you want to do a lot with scripted events, that's a good bet, although it's not consumer friendly. It does run locally, you're not surrendering data to a company or the cloud and everything is yours and everything is configurable. I'm curious about the new localized box in the link as an alternative.
For a while I installed insteon switches and controllers all over the house. One by one they died, I don't think they liked the unreliable power where I lived at the time. Frustrated, I tore it all out and went back to plain old switches; I knew they would just work when I needed them to. I'm open to trying again, especially now that I am in a much larger house and I want to do things like gang-control upstairs and downstairs thermostats in unison to optimize efficiency for the temperature gradient, and control far flung light switches with a master switch or smartphone app. But it's quite an investment to replace all those switches and outlets. Fortunately you don't have to go all in at once, you can just do the things you need the most to start with.
If it's cloud based it's crap.
These companies need to stop with the freaking data harvesting and give us controllers that will work 100% when the internet is down like it is whenever it rains in DSL land.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Yup none of this is automation. I do real automation with Vantage, AMX and Crestron. Most of this stuff is simply cheezy remote control with a huge flaw of requiring internet connections for them to work.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.