Loosely Coupled

At Seed we are promoting a rather radical departure from the currently established smart home topologies. Almost everybody else have been promoting two fundamental angles of approach:

1. A smartphone is used to control the devices
2. A routed mesh network is needed to deliver the commands to the devices

What we say is the opposite:

1. A smartphone is used to configure the smart home network
   (it can also be used as a controller but when outside, to control remotely)
2. There are no control commands being sent to the devices

#1 is quite obvious. Of course the joy of clicking on a phone and controlling lights or blinds is cool. This cool effect has been for years behind the success of Philips Hue and similar products. ("see, I can turn on the light with my iPhone"). But this is short lived. Nobody will like walking around their homes clicking the lights on a phone screen. The lights should be either automatic or controllable with buttons and dimmers - the classic UX we've been using for years. But speaking of the Hue. Wouldn't it be nice to use an existing wall switch as the scene selector? And use the phone app to set up the scenes and associate the switch actions with the behavior of the wireless lamps? This is exactly what our Bluetooth Smart - based system does.

#2 is more tricky. You press a switch. The light turns on. Is the switch sending a command to the lamp? In most systems it is. Be it a source-based routed (Z-Wave) or destination-based routed (ZigBee, Thread) network, the switch formats a command and based on the pre-configured relationship sends the command to the lamp. Which is OK for the switch example. But take the motion sensor. It should activate the lamp, but only when it is dark. The ambient light sensor is a separate unit. How does the motion sensor coordinate the actions with the ambient light sensor to turn on the lamp? It is difficult.

So why don't we reverse the relationships? Instead of the switch addressing the lamp, it should just broadcast the state change "I see motion". The ambient light sensor would report "It is dark". The lamp would listen to the selected messages figuring out: "it is dark, there is motion detected, I should turn on". This publish - subscribe information flow model fundamentally changes how the devices are configured and how the information is being exchanged. Neither the switch nor the light sensor know the recipients of their messages. They just broadcast. The actor devices listen to the subscribed broadcasts and act.

We strongly believe this broadcaster - subscriber model is the right one for smart home. So it is not just the Bluetooth radio that makes us different. It is the approach to the information exchange model, which we believe, is the winning one.