The essence and basic principle of a smart home is that devices can communicate with, and control each other, regardless the brand or technology.
Reality is that too many smart device manufacturers have designed their smart devices to only communicate with their own branded products, and to make matters worse, those devices usually communicate only through their own servers in the cloud. The good news, there is hope on the horizon which is called Matter and explained further in this post.
SmartMaker connects all your different devices into one smart home system, controlled locally and independent. You are in control.
You already have a smart device that you can control from an app on your phone? Cool! Good start but what if you could automate a few things that switches other devices on and off. SmartMaker can help you with that. Connecting all your smart devices into one system that you control.
SmartMaker vision
You should be able to control your smart home locally and from one system. No critical devices that rely on a cloud connection. Nobody wants to be locked out because a cloud service is offline or not able to control lights if there is no internet connection. You have devices from different brands or different technologies? No problem.
So what about cloud dependency?
- What if the manufacturer turns off its cloud servers?
Just to name a few and you might not know them but brands like Revolv, Iris, Insignia, Staples Connect, Wink, and now Insteon, iHome are gone. The graveyard of dead or dying smart home ecosystems that promised so much yet failed to deliver is getting crowded. (source / date: www.theverge.com | smart-home-troubles-insteon-ihome-shutdown-matter / 20th April 2022).
- Giant Amazon its voice assistant Alexa and related products are on pace to lose the company around $10 billion 2022.
Alexa had the third largest number of users behind Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri in 2022. A former Amazon employee told Insider. “It was a wasted opportunity.” (source / date: www.businessinsider.com | amazon-lose-10-billion-this-year-from-alexa-other-devices / 21th November 2022)
Now is this bad news? No because manufacturers start realizing what consumers want and that the future of smart devices is local control. They can be connected to a cloud service for updates but must work locally even without internet. Nobody wants to get stuck with useless devices because the cloud service has been turned off. There is even a name for this: E-Waste.
SmartMaker believes a smart home is the future and the future is already there. The shake out of manufacturers and smart devices that went on the wrong track has started and the proprietary idea about smart devices will slowly but surely be replaced by what works best for the customer.The word is interoperability.
SmartMaker helps you control your smart devices:
- From one app and user experience from your mobile device or computer.
- From different brands with different technologies.
- From your own local network.
Hope matters
There is hope on the horizon called project “Matter” (former CHIP) but after years of delay, Matter has only been launched end of 2022 and only a few devices are on the market and in some cases still not interoperable.
SmartMaker thinks that Matter will be “just another standard” and not replace all existing methods or standards, at least not in the coming five years. Matter is in fact a new standard for the smart home industry and it relies on Thread which is a wireless protocol specifically built for IoT devices to communicate with each other. It’s designed to make them work faster, have fewer points of failure, use less power, and communicate with each other more seamlessly.
Thread is basically further improvement of the existing Zigbee protocol which is a Mesh technology. The nice thing about wireless mesh technology is that you your network is extending itself by adding more devices and not depending on for example your Wifi range.
Read more about Matter and Thread at www.theverge.com | thread-smart-home-protocol-matter-apple-google-interview | 29th July 2022
Keep our fingers crossed that Matter will keep its promise. You will find regular updates on the Matter project on this website.
All information about the Matter Project can be found here.
What SmartMaker can do for you
- You already have some smart devices and want to move to the next level, integrate them and add some automation to your house?
- Start from scratch?
- Having problems with your current setup?
SmartMaker can help you build or rebuild your smart home by making a design, install, configure and deploy your smart home devices into one (local) network.
What SmartMaker can do for you
SmartMaker is not reinventing the smart home industry but simply using existing (open source) software that is already available with a proven track record. What SmartMaker does is setting up a system for you, configuring your devices, setting up the design (graphical interface) how you want to control the system and most important, automation which is the heart of a smart home system.
The business model of smart device manufacturers that keep their smart devices in the cloud has been and it seems, still is, to keep the customer bound the brand.
Apparently it remains difficult for them to accept that the smart home industry will never work properly if devices from different brands are unable to interoperate with each other. It is a pipe dream that they will ever be succesfull if their products are unable to interoperate with others.
The basic principle of a smart home is that devices can communicate with and control each other.
Open Source Platforms are the solution
For years the issue of interoperability has been noticed by developers. Well known platforms like Home Assistant, OpenHAB and Domoticz are available for everyone who want to spend hours if not days to link smart devices together. The learning curve however, is steep especially if you are not familiair with (software) coding.
At Smart Maker, we use Home Assistant but we support other platforms as well. Home Assistant is a proven stable platform and last but least, the idea behind HA is to control devices local and not via the cloud.