Learn More About Smart Home - Home Automation

Learn More About Smart Homes

What is Typically Portrayed as Smart

Presently, products that are labeled as smart are typically no more than internet connected devices. Often these products don’t simplify your life and just move the control from a physical button to App or voice commands. App and voice commands have become the ‘new’ remote control.

A homeowner is presented with what can be a simple as well as a daunting task to attempt to make a smart home.

Simple in the sense that many products offer connectivity with App and voice commands.

Daunting because every product comes with its own App. Buying everything from one company is hardly practical and even then, seamless integration within such an ecosystem has been shown to be problematic.

What Smart should be – It’s time to move beyond remote controls.

A truly smart product should just fade away into the background. Right from on boarding, to configuration, to operation, a truly smart product should be able to provide a carefree and touchless experience to its users.

Like autonomous vehicles, unless you have lived with it you can’t appreciate the experience!

In this article we are going to cover the Light Switch product and its relevance to homeowners.

A Ubiquitous Product

Every room, bathroom, hallways, garage, closet has a light switch. In short where there is artificial light in the home there is bound to be a light switch. It’s always powered. A product that every generation is familiar with.

Look and Feel
- Rockers
  Modern flat rockers are quite popular with some manufacturers. Due to the flat nature of such a switch, there is no tactile feedback on where you are pressing the switch. This becomes a bigger concern in the dark. It’s also difficult to recognize a press or click or combinations thereof, especially if the switch does not have a separate dimmer slider.
- Touch
  This is another innovation and comes at a much higher price point. Touch switches require an understanding of different finger strokes and are non-intuitive for homeowners and especially their guests. Moreover, in colder weather touch switches don’t work with gloves. And of course, there is no tactility.
- Touchscreen
  The light switches in the US are located at about 48”, that is at arms height for most people. It’s not practical to operate a touchscreen at this height since your eyes are at 60”+, much higher than switch height. Unlike a smart phone you cannot adjust the viewing angle of the switch’s display to gain better visibility and access.
Ergonomically designed rocker switches are a proven and familiar interface that every generation understands and there is clear tactile feedback in their operation.

Switch Type
- Dimmer
  LEDs have become the predominant lighting in homes. In the US most LED lights are dimmable, so, a dimmer switch is practical for achieving desired light levels. A desired refinement is for dimmer switch to recognize and adapt the dimming curve for the load. This will provide smooth and flicker-free dimming, one that has the dynamic range to cover the necessary finer control at the lower end of dimming to coarser control at the brighter end.
- Non-Dimmer
  There are some non-dimming loads like fans, exhaust fans, decorative lights etc. for which you will require non dimmers. Since LEDs and efficient fans are not high wattage loads most electronic ON/OFF switches will comply with this requirement.
Connectivity
In the home, widely used protocols are Zigbee, Zeewave, Bluetooth / BLE, and Wi-Fi. Single radio Zigbee, Zeewave, and BLE products require an additional hub or a bridge while products with built-in Wi-Fi will connect directly to your home Access Point. With a light switch that is always powered and with home Wi-Fi meshing technology now available at an affordable price, Wi-Fi is the obvious connectivity choice.
Network Dependency
The network is one of the important factors for any connected light switch and has 3 major parts:
- Switch – The end device that controls the lights.
- App and Voice – The remote control on your smart phone or using voice
- Cloud – The central point to make everything talk to each other and the repository of user data. It is important to understand the operational limitations that occur to a smart switch when your internet goes down.
Power Failures
How does the switch recover from a power failure? Is it like one of the traffic lights that starts flashing red and needs a manual reset or does it automatically recover? With power failures becoming more common due to grid and weather issues, knowing how your smart switch recovers is important.

Beyond App and Voice

As alluded previously, a truly smart light switch goes beyond App and voice commands. Such a switch would preemptively control and adjust lights throughout the day, automatically. This would be touchless operation, where the switch no longer requires manual adjustment, whether via its rocker or via App or voice.

Embodying sensors and software intelligence using AI and ML on the switch, it can learn, understand, and execute homeowner’s preferences automatically.

Such a product requires outside the box thinking, beyond traditional hardware switches. This is where tradition needs to embrace computer science.