The Interconnected Home

Just listened to a GigaOm podcast on what is wrong with the Internet of Things - Om Malik and Stacey Higginbotham discussing what makes sense and what doesn't. Om Malik talks about things not being ready yet, and that devices need to be more transparent and work with each other, introducing a couple of (to me) new phrases - the "interconnected home" and "in-home computing fabric". Well worth listening to:


Stacey is in my opinion the most insightful blogger on Smart Homes and Internet of Things, so if you want to stay up to date just follow her Twitter

Prototyping on Steroids

Domos is primarily an operating system, i.e. a software platform. This is also where we have our core competence. So when we realised we had to make hardware prototype to be able to connect all the cool devices and sensors out there, we clearly felt outside our comfort zone. I had been working towards big OEMs in China, and knew the upfront costs of getting to prototype level could easily run up to $100k. And even worse, it could take months to make. Not great for neither budget nor momentum.

We have now reduced the prototype cost by 90%. And delivery time from months to days. How? Thanks to very cool rapid prototyping technologies:

1. Low-cost hardware development boards like Raspberry Pi, Pandaboard etc have been adopted by makers and geeks around the world. The ecosystems build-in support in open source software projects. In our case, OpenWrt - a Linux distribution for embedded devices that included support for Wifi access point functionality – recently added communities working on RPi and other development boards.



Raspberry Pi - a $35 PC (image from PCMag.com)    

2. Additive manufacturing We’ll be using a technique called Selective Laser Sintering that provide robust, industrial grade casing for our prototypes at zero upfront cost. Best of all, we can test out design ideas at low cost before making final decision.
   

   

   SLS printed house

These rapid prototyping techniques almost completely remove the upfront investment. In return we get a higher unit cost of around $500 - $1,000 per unit. But we only need 10 units to power our Smart Home Labs, so for us it is a no-brainer. And we can do all this in Europe, allowing rapid and iterative development. The big takeaway is that innovators can test their creative ideas in rapid iterations with very limited upfront investment. The result? An explosion of cool, smart gadgets and wearable devices.

I just love technology.

Why we need an OS for the smart home

Homes are slowly getting smarter, but are still far away from reaching its mass market potential. We now have phones that can help us navigate the world, but does very little inside our four walls. We have cars that will soon be on auto-pilot and wearable tech that make Minority Report look yesterday. Surely our homes should be up next?

Yes, they will – but at the current rate of innovation, no time soon. There is no lack of great technology, and the value proposition should be compelling. So what is stopping adoption? The simple answer is – your wifi router.

The wifi router is the single point of connection between all cool sensors, gadgets and devices that are available for the home. They all need to connect through your wifi to connect to their respective cloud and mobile apps. And yet, there has been almost zero innovation on wifi routers when it comes to enabling the smart home. Innovation for smart homes is naturally app-centric these days. And why shouldn't it be, of course you would want to control your house through your mobile?

The answer is “yes”. And “no”. You want the apps. What you don’t want is a separate app for each device. And a separate cloud login. And a separate connector hub. And a separate protocol. There are great smart things out there today, but the underlying infrastructure is simply not scalable.

Smart home infrastructure without Domos

This is why we need the operating system. And why it needs to be on the wifi router. We need to decouple devices from apps. Let device makers make devices. Let developers make apps. Enable open competition and innovation.

In technical terms, the operating system adds an abstraction layer that enables developers to make one app that leverage all connected devices, on any protocol.

The devices are here. The apps are here. The open protocols are here. The smart router OS is the missing link. 

We plan to build it.