Workshop What do you need for a smart home?

Koen Vervloesem

With home automation you control all kinds of devices in the house

The first question you should ask yourself is: what do you want to achieve with home automation? What do you miss in your home in terms of automation that you would like? If you haven’t made this clear to yourself first, you are all too quick to be convinced by the marketing ploys of manufacturers and you probably buy something that you will not use in practice.

IMPROVE YOUR COMFORT
We cannot tell you what provides you with better living comfort. That is a very personal exercise that everyone has to make for themselves. Maybe you have to rush so much every morning that it would be useful if the coffee machine starts making coffee as soon as you get up. You may want to lower the roller shutters automatically in the summer if it threatens to get too hot inside. Or do you want to receive a warning on your smartphone when you leave the house and leave a window open?
Make a list for yourself of the top pain points or frustrations you currently see in your home with ideas on how you could solve or reduce them through automation. Don’t even think about specific products or even prices. Feel free to write down any ideas that come to mind.
But by the end of this thought exercise, your ideas should be ordered in order of importance to them. Because in the next step you will test your ideas against reality and in particular the prices. If you then know that an idea is expensive to implement and low on your priority list, you know that it is a logical choice to delete it.

	The Philips Hue starter kit includes the Hue Bridge and three bulbs

DETERMINE YOUR BUDGET
If you have an idea of ​​what your dream smart home should be able to do, now is the time to get your feet back on the ground. What is your budget? How much money would you like to spend to increase the comfort of your home by turning it into a smart home? Discuss this with your possible partner and be honest with yourself: more comfort is nice, but you have to be able to justify the cost.
As in all areas of home automation, there are cheap and expensive products on the market, so for the same budget you can get more or less functionality, depending on the quality. But we can already give you an idea. Many manufacturers offer a basic set for several hundred euros. Then you have a few smart plugs and sensors and a corresponding gateway to control the whole. Do you not have a lot of budget, do you want to get a taste of home automation and is the functionality sufficient for you? Then feel free to buy such a set.
For better technology and smart sensors, plugs and lamps throughout the house, you have to count on several thousand euros. Do you really want a home automation system without limitations? Then expect an investment of tens of thousands of euros. If you search around for the home automation products on your wish list, you will probably find that fulfilling all your wishes would be too expensive. Thanks to the assigned priorities, you can now cross ideas off your list with your budget in mind.”

WHAT DOES A DOMOTICS SYSTEM COMPRISE?
Before choosing what to buy, let’s take a step back. What exactly does a home automation system consist of? This looks the same with all manufacturers. First of all, you have sensors. This can be a temperature sensor, a contact sensor that measures whether a door is open or closed, a smoke detector and so on. Your home automation system responds to messages from those sensors.
In addition, you have parts that are called actuators in a fancy word. It’s all you can turn on or off. Think of a smart socket, a smart lamp or a roller shutter motor. Many devices are a combination of a sensor and an actuator. A smart thermostat, for example, not only measures the temperature of your living room, but can also switch your boiler on and off.

THE HEART OF YOUR SMART HOME
Finally, you have the heart of your home automation system: the gateway. Manufacturers use many names for this: controller, hub, bridge… It is often a small box the size of an internet modem. The gateway receives the signals from your sensors and controls the actuators. The device often has a web interface with a dashboard and very often also an app. Then you can switch on your lights in the app on your smartphone and read your temperature sensors.
You can often also program time schedules and more complex automations in the app or the web interface, so that, for example, the light in the bathroom switches on automatically at night when you enter the hallway and the light is not on. Many gateways also have integration with voice assistants such as Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa, so that you can control your home via voice commands.

The Google Nest Hub is a smart speaker with a screen

COMMUNICATION PROTOCOL
Then come some important choices that you have to make about your home automation system. We already mentioned that sensors can send you notifications and that you can switch on a switch or lamp via your smartphone. But how are those orders or notifications sent out? This is done via a special protocol that defines the way of communication. For wired solutions, this is, for example, KNX or Loxone. Wireless home automation usually runs via Zigbee or ZWave. Philips Hue and Ikea Trådfri also use Zigbee and also the newer premium products from KlikAanKlikUit, whose model number starts with a Z.
You can combine products from different manufacturers and with different communication protocols, but then your gateway must support all of them. After all, for Zigbee or ZWave, the gateway must have a special transmitter and receiver built in. So check that before you buy products. A gateway like Homey supports multiple protocols. If you are not afraid to roll up your sleeves yourself, you can achieve the same with a Raspberry Pi, extra transceivers for Zigbee and ZWave and software such as Home Assistant or Domoticz. If you already have a gateway such as a Philips Hue Bridge, you can often connect it to another gateway.

A gateway like Homey supports multiple communication protocols

In recent years, many products have also appeared that you simply connect to your network via WiFi. Think of lamps and sockets from TPLink, Shelly or myStrom. The advantage is that you don’t even need a gateway for this. After all, these devices speak the same language as your computer, smartphone or tablet. All you have to do is open the manufacturer’s app, which often finds the devices on your network by itself. The disadvantage is that you need multiple apps if you are going to combine WiFi products from multiple manufacturers, unless you choose a gateway that supports the different devices.

	Do you use for your home automation system? the cloud (left) or do you prefer to run everything locally (right)?

IN THE CLOUD?
The first home automation systems of the past all worked without internet. But in recent years we have seen more and more that manufacturers link their home automation systems to a cloud service. That lowers the threshold considerably. This way you can easily access your home devices from anywhere via an app, via the servers of the producer. The firmware on your devices is also automatically kept up-to-date by the manufacturer. And thanks to the cloud, you also get access to the stronger computing power and smart algorithms on the producer’s servers. The best example of this are the smart speakers like Google Home and Amazon Echo.
However, there are also many disadvantages to these cloud services. Is your internet connection down or is the manufacturer’s cloud service malfunctioning? Then you can suddenly no longer operate your lamps via your home automation system. But it could be worse. For example, in May 2020, Wink suddenly announced that from the following week it would charge a monthly fee for the use of its cloud service. Those who refused to pay were left with a worthless Wink Hub. And also think of the privacy aspect: the producer of a cloud-based home automation system has a full view of your home. So carefully weigh the advantages of a cloud-based home automation system against the disadvantages and risks.

With Home Assistant you can run a complete local home automation system

OR LOCAL?
On the other hand, it is still possible to run a home automation system completely locally. This has many advantages: your privacy is better protected, your devices continue to work when there is no internet connection and even if the manufacturer goes bankrupt, everything continues to work. Your devices also respond faster: if you switch on a lamp in the app of your home automation system, that command does not have to go through the manufacturer’s servers first. But this approach also has drawbacks. On the one hand, local home automation systems are often more difficult to set up and you are responsible for the updates yourself. On the other hand, you cannot control your home automation system from the outside, unless you take care of it yourself with port forwarding and dynamic dns, but that is also so difficult to set up. Moreover, in local home automation systems you have no or fewer options for advanced functionalities such as voice control and AI. Mixed forms are of course also possible, whereby you set up a home automation system that can be used completely locally, but uses cloud servers from the manufacturer for specific functionality (such as access from outside or voice control).

YOUR CHOICE
You have now thought about what you expect from your smart home and what budget you have for it. You know what you need and what options are available. Home automation is always very personal, so now it’s up to you to choose a system. In the next two articles we explain one possible system: Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi.