How to Integrate the Internet of Things

Habitech’s Technical Manager Justin Martin Lawrence explains the different thinking behind the new wave of IoT devices and how they can be integrated within smarter homes.

The IoT is everywhere. These days you would struggle to find a home that has a

“traditional” control system without also having at least one IoT device. Whether

it’s a camera or a thermostat, a light bulb or a Tesla car - even a child’s dolly -

thousands of household products are equipped to communicate directly with the

Internet rather than the control system. This is the new way of things, and

numbers will skyrocket.

The big question for a CI industry weaned on proprietary control ecosystems is

how to integrate the Internet of Things with whole-house control. When 99% of CI

jobs involve networking, we have a responsibility to our clients and businesses to

answer this question. We cannot ignore IoT in the hope that it will go away, so let’s

first understand why it exists and how it works.

From Google Trends we can see that interest in the “Internet of Things” started to

rise sharply at the beginning of 2013, although IoT devices have been around for

much longer. As far back as 1990, the first IoT device was a toaster that could be

turned on and off over the internet. Today the most popular IoT device is the Nest

thermostat for which Google paid a whopping $3.2bn in 2014. Clearly Google

thinks IoT is going to be massive, yet, with one exception, every residential control

system deployed in the CI business today was developed using a fundamentally

different technology long before 2014.

Why IoT?

Before the influx of IoT devices things were easier for CI, but harder for

consumers. In the CI world control APIs were relatively simple, network

traffic was significantly lower, and thermostats did not talk to the Internet.

Companies like Nest were never going to get a pretty-looking thermostat

to mass-market unless it was better than all the others and easy to install.

Cost was also a consideration, so putting heavy processing in a wall-

mounted device was out of the question.

But if you created a device that could intelligently track things like a

building’s thermal efficiency whether the consumer was at home or not,

well, that would change everything. The local functionality would be simple

to achieve: you’d have a microprocessor looking at area temperature and

add a simple PIR-type device to detect when there is movement in the

house. What you’d need is a way of collecting that information and putting

it to good use. Hey presto, IoT.

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So how does IoT work?

It’s not like poking a hole in a firewall so that you can access a network camera. It actually

works the other way around. The diagram opposite helps to explain this. These days every

home network has a router with a firewall, which stops things getting in unless something

inside the network has asked for it. When you register your Nest thermostat or smoke

alarm, it creates a connection through your router to the Nest Cloud on the Internet. From

time-to-time the thermostat sends out information like temperature, presence etc, and

because there’s a connection from within the firewall, the cloud can send instructions back

without being blocked. It can also send software updates and so on. This means that

every time you open the Nest App on your iPad, you are communicating through a secure

Internet connection to the Nest Cloud, rather than to the thermostat itself, which in turn

receives its instructions from the cloud.

Applying the same logic to Amazon’s Alexa for instance means that the voice recognition

functionality sits in the cloud, not in the device or any other on your local network.

This is brilliant for device manufacturers and for consumers. The customer plugs in the

device, registers it, and everything starts working. Interaction with the IoT device appears

to be simultaneous because the instructions being sent to and from the cloud are part of

the same platform. Furthermore it doesn’t matter whether the customer is at home, at

work or on holiday. It just works.

When it isn’t entirely IoT

Not all IoT devices use the Internet for control and communication exclusively. Philips Hue

is a good example. With Hue there is a strong element of IoT App control, but also a local

API that a control system can implement to dim or change colour. This is, of course, a

sensible approach: it would be a health and safety nightmare if the lights in your home

were dependent on the Internet! All the same there is a big downside to the exchange of

third party APIs, as we shall see.

IoT Cloud

Levering-in a Control System

If you’ve been in the industry as long as I have, you will have seen

the countless the driver updates needed to retain compatibility with

your customers’ systems. The problem with most local control

platforms is that they rely on an API/Driver provided by the device

manufacturer. It becomes a two-speed scenario. Whereas IoT

manufacturers can update the APIs for the devices remotely and at

will, there is an inevitable lag to their implementation within an ‘alien’

control system. When a local API/driver must rely on third-party

updates to perform complex security transactions, the integration of

IoT control often seems as if it is held in-place with sticky tape.

The diagram opposite shows how a Control System manufacturer

may implement IoT control. I refer to this as “interpretive”. In the

diagram, the iPad and the touch screen talk on the local network to

the Control System Processor (CSP). The Control System

manufacturer will have gained some form of API from the IoT vendor,

or in some cases reverse-engineered it. The CSP controls the IoT

device either by a connection to the device’s IoT cloud or through a

local API (if supported).

This process introduces three potential issues. Firstly Latency. Few

control systems are designed with complex internet exchanges in-

mind, and deploying an “interpretive” process with the CSP as the

middleman introduces more complexity. Secondly reliability. Relying

on the CSP for mission-critical operations such as lighting or heating

is more risky. Thirdly upgradeability. If the IoT vendor makes a

firmware or API change then the driver in the CSP needs to be

updated to retain compatibility.

IoT Cloud

A better method of Control

Tear yourself away from thinking of home control as relying on a proprietary user interface with

preferences prescribed by the control system designer. This is the legacy approach. Although individual

IoT devices operate through dedicated links to the cloud, they all share the benefits of a well-developed

application for iOS and Android, bristling with user experience (UX) features including gesture and voice

control. Unlike many proprietary control system interfaces, which are often slow and poorly rendered, IoT

devices can also rely on a highly sophisticated, relatively inexpensive and near universal control platform

already in liberal use around the homes of their customers. The iPad, the Galaxy, the Fire HD are the

best examples of the home control screens of the future, available today.

As the diagram below shows, they provide local and IoT control. Both iOS and Android multitask: they

can have several apps running at the same time and make it easy to switch between IoT vendor apps

and Control System apps.

What today’s integrators need is a global control platform that ties all the IoT apps together with

an intuitive user interface, yet can handle LAN and legacy IR control of local devices easily. In

my own home, and at our office, I use SimpleControl. This is an iOS-based control system,

designed from the ground up to integrate tightly with IoT but also provide a bridge to control

legacy devices. The SimpleControl UI provides preloaded and predesigned graphics, protocols

and IP/serial/IR control codes for tens of thousands of devices, allowing customers to engage

with their audio, video, lighting, heating and security systems in the manner they prefer on the

devices they already own.

With SimpleControl on an iPad, use in-app URL jumps to interact with Google Maps for instance

or in the case of my MusicCast system at home: jump across to the MusicCast app to start the

player, switch on the amp and select the music. In addition, SimpleControl’s support of iBeacons

help the iPad to detect your location as you move around the home, switching the interface to

the zone as you enter it.

IoT Cloud

Where’s my iPad?

If you’ve a family like mine, you will be familiar with the perennial problem of the

disappearing iPad, and your child’s belief that it never needs plugging in because it

charges over WiFi. Thankfully iPort has an elegant solution in the form of Surface

Mount: a sleek aluminium sleeve that encompasses the iPad and mounts to a wall

charging station. The latest variation of the SM series is LuxePort, a deluxe iPad

charging and mounting system for tabletop and wall locations.

So when the iPad becomes the only control screen you’ll ever need, you’ll know

where to find it, and it will always be charged. Isn’t that neat?

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Utilize iPad Microphone

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+44 (0)1256 638500 www.habitech.co.uk