The definition of Smart Home

Imagine after a tiring workday, when you arrive home, you open the door using your fingerprint or your own voice and enter.

Just as you settle on the couch, using an app on your mobile device, you balance the temperature of your home, pull the curtains aside, turn on the lamps and television, and with the same app, you even switch TV channels! If you have the patience, you also water the garden in your backyard. In this article, we delve into the examination of smart home technology.

Digital dreams that we often witnessed plentifully in the science fiction genre of Hollywood movies during the 1980s and 1990s have arrived with a storm of inventions and technologies in the 21st century.

The extraordinary phenomenon of “smart home” refers to the automation of predetermined tasks within a home. When we talk about home automation, we mean that all household tools function automatically and do not require human intervention.

Smart home technology, alongside your personal mobile phone or tablet, manages home automation for you in the best way possible.

What is a Smart Home?

Imagine most of your household items, from wall clocks and speakers to security cameras and curtains, being connected to the internet. Smart homes are referred to as places where all or most of the electrical (and perhaps non-electronic) components and appliances are integrated through a smart hub and can work together using synchronization, exchange information with each other, and ultimately fulfill all your desires.

You can open the curtains of your home when you’re away, allowing sunlight to reach your plants, or you can create various scenarios for different parts of the house. From setting the temperature of your home day and night to controlling the hours your child can watch television, these technologies, also known as home automation, ultimately bring comfort, convenience, and energy efficiency to you.

Why Should We Make Our Homes Smart?

Energy Saving and Efficiency

One of the reasons for home automation is energy conservation and cost reduction by using automatic heating and cooling systems. With these tools, you can easily adjust the temperature of your home. For instance, a smart thermostat scans your entire home and detects unoccupied areas, only heating the necessary spaces. You can link these capabilities to other devices such as lights or communication devices to see how much energy consumption you’re saving per year.

Enhanced Security at Home and Workplace

Official and unofficial statistics indicate an increase in home burglaries. By smartening up your home with motion sensors, smart locks, smart cameras, and more, you can significantly enhance the security of your home or workplace. For example, connecting motion sensors and smart locks to an alarm can trigger a loud siren and send you notifications when someone passes by the motion sensor or tries to interact with the smart door lock. The smart door locks we mentioned in this article are almost unhackable and are made with durable alloys.

If all of these points don’t convince you, various smart camera models with their sensors can send alarms and notifications to you.

Smart Remote Control

One of the advantages of a smart home is that you can control your smart devices from anywhere. Whether you’re at home or away, you can control your smart devices. When you return home, you can turn on the thermostat to warm up or cool down your home, or when you’re on a trip, you can remotely close the curtains for a few hours so that burglars don’t notice your absence. If you install smart cameras at home, some models allow you to speak to people on the premises through the built-in speaker.

Comfort of Life with Technology

With smart devices, you can control all your household items from a single spot, similar to the old science fiction movies. From turning on lamps and the television to using smart vacuum cleaners that can clean your home whenever you want. The main philosophy of a smart home is to bring comfort and convenience to people.

Personalization and Programming

For instance, you can define for your smart curtains that during the day, when there’s no need to turn on the lights, the curtains should be open, and during darkness, they should automatically provide protection. Smart fridges, based on artificial intelligence, can detect which items are running low and order the most used ones for you.

An Excellent Investment

As you might have guessed, smart home devices are not cheap, but by installing them significantly in your home, they increase the value of your property. Generally, the value of a home, apart from its area and location, is also related to the materials used and the signature of the designer and builder. A home equipped with smart amenities will have several times the monetary value of the basic amenities.

How Can We Make Our Home Smart?

Before implementing smart solutions, you need to determine what needs a “smart home” should address. However, to transform a regular home into a smart home, you need these three things:

• Home Wi-Fi connection
• Smart appliances (or devices)
• A hub to manage, monitor, and control these smart devices.

Which parts and items of a building can be made smart?

Despite efforts and significant achievements in this field, we are witnessing the introduction of new technologies and tools in this regard every day. But as an example, the following cases can be mentioned:

• – Lighting (various smart switches)
• – Energy consumption management system
• – Smart security system
• – Television and audiovisual systems
• – Electric curtains and other motorized equipment
• – Parking doors
• – Entry and exit handles and locks
• – Moving ceilings
• – Irrigation systems
• – Pool and jacuzzi control
• – Suspicious motion detection
• – Gas valve on/off

Different sections of a smart home

For your smart home to work well, different parts must be able to work alongside each other. These parts include:

Central hub

The central control device of the smart home, or central hub, is the beating heart of the smart building system. The hub’s task is to receive the commands that the user wants to send to the components of the smart home so that the desired equipment can execute those commands. Another task of the hub is to connect all the components of the smart home. The way the hub works is that it connects to the other components of the building and acts as a coordinator between all of them. It connects and controls all smart home devices, from home theater and music systems to security systems and smart lamps.

Communication protocols

For different parts of the smart home to communicate easily with each other and with the central controller (hub), there needs to be a defined communication path. A communication protocol is a standardized route that all system components can use to exchange information. These communication paths can be wireless or wired.

Types of communication protocols

Communication protocols for a smart home can be categorized into two groups:

• Wired protocols

They utilize existing wiring in your home to establish communication.

• Wireless protocols

Wireless protocols are usually faster and compatible with a wide range of devices. These protocols can connect to each other without relying on power lines and establish communication.

User interfaces

Smart home interfaces are tools that allow users to communicate with devices inside the home. These tools range from smart keys and touchscreens to smart remote controls that replace all home remotes.

Sensors

Sensors are tools that can report different conditions of the home, such as light, temperature, humidity, or the presence of smoke, and provide these reports to the central controller (hub) using communication protocols (Wi-Fi, Zigbee), enabling pre-programmed scenarios to be implemented. For example, the heating system can turn on automatically when the temperature drops to a certain level.

Actuators

Actuators are components of smart systems that perform tasks like opening parking doors, moving motorized curtains, and turning on pool purification pumps. In simple terms, actuators are “movers” that execute issued commands.