Consumers are increasingly adopting various wireless technologies to monitor and control the home environment. The goals of the smart home are greater convenience, energy savings, and safety. Thanks to an amazing selection of wireless technologies, it’s possible to create a wide range of affordable convenience products for the home.
To foster this trend, designers continue to seek viable new products while lowering costs. The secret ingredients of smart-home devices are the wireless technology chosen, ease of installation and operation, energy savings if applicable, and of course affordability. Here are some examples of popular products that achieve these basic features.
Top Smart-Home Applications
It all started with the Nest thermostat. Startup Nest created an innovative programmable thermostat that could replace most existing thermostats and readily provide significant energy savings. The big feature was Wi-Fi that connected the thermostat to the home router. This provided a way to monitor and control the thermostat remotely over the internet. It was a huge success; Google wound up buying the company in 2014.
Today, a thermostat is just one of dozens of Internet of Things (IoT) devices that are finding their way into many homes. Other popular devices include door locks, door bells, security cameras, weather stations, and appliances like refrigerators, washers, and dryers. Even light bulbs can be connected and controlled.
A popular new product category is the smart speaker that incorporates voice recognition and response, such as Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple HomePod. These devices allow other devices to be controlled by voice input. Today’s IoT devices are smarter, have more features, and are generally easier to set up and use.
The core components of such IoT devices are microcontrollers (MCUs) and radios. Typically, the MCU and radio are packaged on the same chip. An example is Texas Instruments’ SimpleLink wireless MCU series. Multiple versions provide a good fit with different wireless requirements and processing power.