IoT Home Automation: Getting

Started
Home automation has three major parts:

 Hardware
 Software/Apps
 Communication protocols

Each of these parts is equally important in building a truly smart home

experience for your customers. Having the right hardware enables the
ability to develop your IoT prototype iteratively and respond to
technology pivots with ease.
A protocol selected with the right testing and careful consideration helps
you avoid performance bottlenecks that otherwise would restrict the
technology and device integration capabilities with sensors and IoT
gateways.
Another important consideration is the firmware that resides in your
hardware managing your data, managing data transfer, firmware OTA
updates, and performing other critical operations to make things talk.

Applications of Home Automation

Rebuilding consumer expectations, home automation has been projected
to target wide array applications for the new digital consumer. Some of
the areas where consumers can expect to see home automation led IoT-
enabled connectivity are:

 Lighting control
 HVAC
 Lawn/Gardening management
 Smart Home Appliances
 Improved Home safety and security
 Home air quality and water quality monitoring
 Natural Language-based voice assistants
 Better Infotainment delivery
 AI-driven digital experiences
 Smart Switches
  Smart Locks
 Smart Energy Meters

The list is still not exhaustive and will evolve over the time to
accommodate new IoT use cases.
Now that you are familiar with home automation applications, let’s have
a detailed look at what components are involved in building a typical
home automation prototype.

Home Automation Components

We have talked about them before, but let’s clearly separate our
components that will finally help you build a realistic model of what
major components are involved in building a smart home. The major
components can be broken into:

 IoT sensors
 IoT gateways
 IoT protocols
 IoT firmware
 IoT cloud and databases
 IoT middleware (if required)

IoT sensors involved in home automation are in thousands, and there

are hundreds of home automation gateways as well. Most of the
firmware is either written in C, Python, Node.js, or any other
programming language.
The biggest players in IoT cloud can be divided into a platform-as-a-
service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).

Major IoT PaaS Providers

 AWS IoT
 Azure IoT
 Thingworx
 Ubidots
 Thingspeak
 Carriots
 Konekt
  TempoIQ
 Xively
 IBM Bluemix

Characteristics of IoT Platforms

Again, these platforms are extremely divided over the IoT application
and security-related features that they provide. A few of these platforms
are open source.
Let’s have a look at what you should expect from a typical IoT platform:

 Device security and authentication

 Message brokers and message queuing
 Device administration
 Support towards protocols like CoAP, MQTT, and HTTP
 Data collection, visualization, and simple analysis capabilities
 Integrability with other web services
 Horizontal and vertical scalability
 WebSocket APIs for real-time for real-time information flow

Apart from what we mentioned above, more and more platform builders
are open sourcing their libraries to developers. Take for example the
Dallas temperature library for DS18B20 for Arduino was quickly ported
because of open source development to a new version that helped
developers to integrate DS18B20 with Linkit One. Understanding these
things become crucial as IoT tends to evolve continuously and having an
equally responsive platform makes it business safe to proceed.
Let’s now deeply evaluate each of these components, starting with IoT
sensors.

Home Automation Sensors

There are probably thousands of such sensors out there that can be a
part of this list, but since this is an introduction towards smart home
technology, we will keep it brief. We will break down IoT sensors for
home automation by their sensing capabilities:

 Temperature sensors
 Lux sensors
 Water level sensors
  Air composition sensors
 Video cameras for surveillance
 Voice/Sound sensors
 Pressure sensors
 Humidity sensors
 Accelerometers
 Infrared sensors
 Vibrations sensors
 Ultrasonic sensors

Depending upon what you need, you may use one or many of these to
build a truly smart home IoT product. Let’s have a look at some of the
most commonly used home automation sensors.

Temperature Sensors
The market is full of them, but the famous temperature sensors are
DHT11/22, DS18B20, LM35, and MSP430 series from TI. The MSP430
series is more accurate than the rest, but at the same time, it is one of the
most expensive for prototyping or initial product testing purposes.
MSP430 tops all temperature sensors, as the precision and battery
consumption is minimal with them.
The DHT11 has a very restricted temperature range and suffers from
accuracy issues. DHT22, on the other hand, is a little bit more accurate
but still, doesn’t make it as the preference.
The DS18B20, on the other hand, is more accurate, as opposed to digital
temperature sensors like the DHT22 and 11. Dallas temperature sensors
are analog and can be extremely accurate down to 0.5 degrees.
Take note that often, the temperatures that you directly sense from
these sensors may not be very accurate, and you would occasionally see
1000 F or greater values no matter what you are doing.
There’s an entire logic that goes around building temperature sensors
that we will address in another blog post.

Lux Sensors
Lux sensors measure the luminosity and can be used to trigger various
functions range from cross-validating movements to turn the lights on if
it becomes too dark. Some of the most popular light sensors are TSL2591
and BH1750.
Recent tests to include TSL2591 and BH1750 into low-powered IoT
devices have found them to be working fairly well for most use cases.
Here’s a study done by Robert and Tomas that shows how these two
compare against a spectrometer and a photodiode.
To get a good idea of whether these two sensors would meet your needs,
we would suggest illuminance tests followed by normalizations of the
data to observe deviations under various situations.

Water Level Sensors

While building your prototype, you may consider a solid state eTape
liquid level sensor or, like others, just use an HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor
to measure the water level.
On the other hand, in other cases where those two don’t suffice, one has
to utilize something that can deliver a much higher performance.
Float level sensors and other ICs like LM1830 offer a more precise
measurement capability to IoT developers — although, they are
substantially much more expensive than others.

Air Composition Sensors

There are a couple of specific sensors that are used by developers to
measure specific components in the air:

 CO monitoring by MiCS-5525
 MQ-8 to measure Hydrogen gas levels
  MiCS-2714 to measure nitrogen oxide
 MQ135 to sense hazardous gas levels (NH3, NOx, Alcohol, Benzene,
smoke, CO2

Most of these are sensors have a heating time, which also means that
they require a certain time before they actually start delivering accurate
values.

These sensors mainly rely on their surface to detect gas components.

When they initially start sensing, there’s always something that’s there
on their surface, some sort of deposition that requires some heating to
go away.
Hence, after the surface gets heated enough, true values start to show up.

Video Cameras for Surveillance and

Analytics
A range of webcams and cameras specific to hardware development kits
are usually used in such scenarios. Hardware with USB ports offer to
integrate camera modules to build functionality.
But utilizing USB ports is not very efficient, especially in the case of real-
time video transfer or any kind of video processing.
Take the Raspberry Pi for example. It comes with a camera module (Pi
cam) that connects using a flex connector directly to the board without
using the USB port. This makes the Pi cam extremely efficient.
Sound Detection
Sound detection plays a vital role in everything from monitoring babies
to automatically turning lights on and off to automatically detecting your
dog’s sound at the door and opening it up for your pet.
Some commonly used sensors for sound detection include the SEN-
12462 and EasyVR Shield for rapid prototyping.
These sensors aren’t as good as industrial-grade sensors like those
from 3DSignals, which can detect even ultra-low levels of noise and fine
tune between various noise levels to build even machine break-up
patterns.

Humidity Sensors
These sensors bring the capability of sensing humidity/RH levels in the
air to smart homes. The accuracy and sensing precision depends a lot on
multiple factors, including the overall sensor design and placement.
But certain sensors like the DHT22 and 11, built for rapid prototyping,
will always perform poorly when compared to high-quality sensors like
HIH6100 and Dig RH.
While building a product to sense humidity levels, ensure that there’s no
localized layer of humidity that is obscuring the actual results. Also, keep
in mind that in certain small spaces, the humidity might be too high at
one end as compared to the others.
When you look at free and open spaces where the air components can
move much freely, the distribution around the sensor can be expected to
be uniform and, subsequently, will require fewer corrective actions for
the right calibration.

Home Automation Protocols

One of the most important parts of building a home automation product
is to think about protocols — protocols that your device will use to
communicate to gateways, servers, and sensors. A few years ago, the
only way to do so was by either using Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or GSM. But due
to added expenses on cellular SIM cards and low performance of Wi-Fi,
most such solutions didn’t work.
Bluetooth survived and later evolved as Bluetooth Smart or Bluetooth
Low Energy. This helped bring a lot of connectivity in the “mobile server
powered economy.” Essentially, your phone would act as a middleware
to fetch data from BLE-powered sensors and send it over to the internet.
When looking at the major home automation protocols, the following top
the list:

 Bluetooth Low Energy or Bluetooth Smart: Wireless protocol with

mesh capabilities, security, data encryption algorithms, and much
more. Ideal for IoT-based products for smart homes.
 Zigbee: Low cost, mesh networked, and low power radio
frequency-based protocol for IoT. Different Zigbee versions don’t
talk to each other.
 X10: A legacy protocol that utilizes powerline wiring for signaling
and control.
 Insteon: Communicates with devices both wirelessly and with
wires.
 Z-wave: Specializes in home automation with an emphasis on
security.
 Wi-Fi: Needs no explanation.
 UPB: Uses existing power lines installed in a home. Reduces costs.
 Thread: A royalty-free protocol for smart home automation, uses a
6lowpan.
 ANT: An ultra low-power protocol helping developers build low-
powered sensors with a mesh distribution capabilities.
 6lowpan

Home Automation: Which Protocol Is the

Best?
While there are some protocols that clearly offer much more, it is always
important to start from your smart home development needs and then
move towards narrowing down the solutions.
The commonly preferred protocols are Bluetooth Low Energy, Z-wave,
Zigbee, and Thread. The protocol selection can now be narrowed down
by the following factors:

 Ability to perform identity verification

 Quality of sensor networks
  Data transfer rate
 Security level
 Network topology required
 Density of objects around
 Effective Distance to be covered

Home Automation Architecture

This architecture supports the following considerations for home

automation solutions:

 End to end security mechanisms involving multilevel

authentication
 End to end data encryption, including the link layer
 Flexible and configurable access and authorization control
 Powerful cloud infrastructure
 Network agnostic with built-in feedback loops
 Configurable cloud-based rules engine
 API endpoints
 Data scalability
 NoSQL databases

Home Automation Gateways

For developing a home automation product, often a standalone product
sending data to a server is not enough. Due to battery and protocol
limitations, the data from a sensor or sensors present in a home has
been routed through an IoT gateway.
To select the perfect gateway for your IoT home automation, consider
some of these factors:

 Communication protocols supported

 Real-time capabilities
 MQTT, CoAP, and HTTPS support
 Security and configuration
 Modularity

When it comes to building IoT gateways, modularity and hybrid IoT

protocol support top the list when a product is in the early stages of
market introduction.
To incorporate a gateway in your home automation stack, you can
consider the following options:

 Either create a gateway from the ground up using existing

hardware stacks for prototyping (using Raspberry Pi, Intel Edison,
etc). Then, when a PoC is validated, you can create your own
custom hardware.

 Or, you can use existing gateway modules like Ingincs BLE

gateway. These gateways are extremely easy to customize and
connect with your cloud services and devices. However, they may
or may not offer the same level of support that you need to build
certain features.
For example, a gateway with a bad networking queue may result in
traffic congestion, or it may not support the required protocols that you
wish to use.
Further, pivoting with these gateways to some other technology stack
may become very difficult. It should be emphasized that they are
extremely good for robust prototyping needs.

Home Automation Programming Languages

The following programming languages dominate the home automation
space: Python, Embedded C, C, Shell, Go, and JavaScript (Node.js). This
has mainly happened due to the sheer optimization of the languages for
similar use cases.

Home Automation Frameworks

If you think you can build everything for home automation (protocols,
hardware, software, etc.) on your own, that is a bit unrealistic. Everyone,
from high-growth startups to billion-dollar consumer-focused
enterprises, is now using the help of home automation frameworks to
build connected products to delight consumers.
There are more than 15 different smart home frameworks available for
IoT developers to use and build their next generation of connected home
products. Some of these frameworks are open source and some are
closed-source. Let’s have a look at some of them in the sections that
follow.

Open Source IoT Platforms and

Frameworks
Looking forward to doing a quick and dirty prototype? There’s no need
to write down everything from scratch. Thanks to a bunch of awesome
contributions, we have open source platforms that can get your home
automation products up and running in no time.
Our favorites are:

 Home Assistant
 Calaos
 Domoticz
 OpenHAB: Supports Raspberry Pi, written in Java and has design
tools to build your own mobile apps by tweaking UI.
 OpenMotics[Asked their developer, waiting for them to
respond(dev confirmed)]
 LinuxMCE
 PiDome
 MisterHouse
 Smarthomatic
Let’s take a look at the major home automation IoT platforms.

Home Assistant
Supports Raspberry Pi, uses Python, and the OS is Hassbian. It has
simplified automation rules that developers can use to build their home
automation product, saving them thousands of lines of code.
Home Assistant supports the following:

How Home Assistant works:

 Home control: Responsible for collecting information and storing

devices.
 Home automation triggers commands based on user
configurations.
 Smart home triggers based on past user behavior.
As developers, it is very important for us to understand the architecture
of Home Assistant for us to build high-performing products on top of it.
Let’s have a look at the architecture that makes control and information
flow possible.
Home control consists of five components:

 Components
 State machine
 Event bus
 Service registry
 Timer

The core architecture of Home Assistant:

All of these components working together create a seamless

asynchronous system for smart home IoT. In the earlier version of Home
Assistant core, the core often had to stop while looking for new device
information.
But with the new versions of Home Assistant, a backward compatible
API, and an async core have been introduced, making things a lot faster
for IoT applications.
The best part about home assistant’s core architecture is how carefully it
has been designed and developed to support IoT at home.
OpenHAB
OpenHAB is a home automation and IoT gateway framework for smart
homes. Similar to Home Assistant, OpenHAB works nicely with
Raspberry Pi and comes with their own design tools to create a UI for
your home automation product.
An understanding architecture of OpenHAB:

 Modularity: It is realized with the bundle concept

 Runtime dynamics: So that software components can be managed
at runtime
 Service orientation: There are services for various components to
speak with each other and exchange information

Further relying on the OGSi framework, it leverages the following layers

stacked together:

 Modular layer: Manages dependencies between bundles

 Life cycle layer: Controls the life cycle of the bundles
 Service layers: Defines a dynamic model of communication
between various modules
 Actual services: This is the application layer, using all other layers
 Security layer: Optional, leverages Java 2 security architecture and
manages permissions from different modules
OpenHAB features:

 Plugin framework
 Rules engine
 Logging mechanism
 UI abstraction: A tree structure for UI Widgets, Item UI providers,
and dynamic UI configuration
 UI implementations are available for the web, Android, and iOS
 Designer tools availability

OpenHAB has been primarily only been observed as a project for the
hobbyist programmer, and even many parts of openhab.org convey the
same. But we have observed a different effort in recent times from
OpenHAB in building the developer economy for building IoT smart
homes.
Take this slowly growing GitHub repo talking about OpenHAB cloud, for
example.
According to the repository, OpenHAB cloud architecture will look
something like this:

Impressive enough that some open platform out there is thinking about
system services, Cron jobs, logging, etc.
Further, let's look at the frameworks and technologies that openHAB will
support: Node.js, Express.js, Nginx, MongoDB, Redis, Socket.IO.
Unlike Home Assistant’s vast integrability, openHAB is currently limited
to:

 IFTTT
 Amazon Alexa
 AWS EC2 [AWS Multi-AZ isn’t compatible for multiple time zone
availability]
 AWS IoT with openHAB
 MQTT support

OpenHAB is extremely powerful, but at the same time very limited in

terms of integration. The team behind openHAB is extremely promising
and have already conveyed their plans to open up openHAB to other
integration capabilities very shortly.

Calaos
Calaos was developed initially by a company that closed back in 2013,
but home automation since then has grown, and it is being maintained
and upgraded by developers. While now being open source, it facilitates
premade source code to:

 Create sweet home environments

 Control music
 Automation rules that focus on time, mood, or ambiance
 Easy configuration

Calaos supports the following hardware:

 Premoboard
 Cubieboard
 Raspberry Pi
 Intel-based machines

Their lack of support towards developing private IoT applications

restricts their usage by developers to build high-quality solutions for
consumers.

Domoticz
Domoticz allows you to monitor and configure your devices and sensors
with the simplest possible design. Impressive enough that the entire
project is extremely lightweight, it further is backed by high integrability
with third parties and features like auto-learning switches.
This platform has been designed to work with operating systems like
Linux and Windows.
Protocol capabilities of Domoticz include: Z-wave, Bluetooth, Apple
Homekit, X10, and MQTT
Hardware integration capabilities of Domoticz:

 RFXCOM transceiver
 ESP2866 Wi-Fi module
 P1 smart meter
 Youless meter
 Pulse counters
 1-Wire
 Philips Hue
 Essent E thermostat

Domiticz can be used to create any sort of services that you can think of,
ranging from a smart weather device to a Telegram bot.

Domoticz Architecture
Currently, very few people know about the architecture of Domoticz,
making it extremely difficult to build applications on it without taking
unnecessary risks in building the product itself.
For example, the entire design of general architecture feels a little weird
when you look at the concept of a sensor to control to an actuator. It
seems to be missing.
Building advanced applications with Domoticz can be done using C++,
lula, PHP, shell, etc.

Blockchain in IoT
Consumers, especially those who grew up in the digital era, understand
the importance of privacy. With the evolution of IoT, security has taken
center stage for realistic deployment scenarios.
Deployment of blockchain into home networks can easily be done with a
$35 Raspberry Pi. A blockchain secured layer between devices and
gateways can be implemented without a massive revamp of the existing
code base.
Simply put, blockchain is a technology that would be an implementation
that most users won’t even know about, but it will play a huge role in the
future to reassure them with revolutionary and new business models
like dynamic renting for Airbnb.
So far, interoperability issues and broken protocols seemed to have
hampered the growth of IoT-based smart homes.
But as technology is progressing and more and more computing power
can be generated with very low-powered devices, home automation will
gradually become a technology that will easy for us to build and develop
for on a daily basis.