Smart Home & Consumer IoT
What changes when a connected product has to live in a home
A smart home product is judged where its engineers are not: in a hallway, on a router that gets replaced, by a person who has never set up a device. Indeema builds connected products for that environment, where the device, its network, the cloud and the app in a person’s hand have to behave as one product. It applies to smart home, consumer IoT and connected building products alike.
See what the home changesThe environment
A home is not a lab
These conditions come with the environment, whatever the product does.
A home, drawn as the parts a product has to reach.
- SETUP
Set up by someone who is not an engineer
Onboarding is part of the product. Pairing, provisioning and instructions are designed across the device, the app and the cloud.
- INTEROPERABILITY
Placed among products it did not choose
The home already has hubs, assistants and devices from other makers. How the product must speak to them is set by the ecosystem it joins, not by its maker.
- RADIO
Sharing the air with every other radio
Many small sensors talk to one hub. Radio traffic and latency decide whether the system feels dependable.
- CONNECTIVITY
On a network the household controls
Routers are replaced, passwords change and connections drop. The product has to be designed for that day, and for recovering without a service call.
- PHYSICAL
Small, visible and always on
The enclosure, the board layout and the indicator light are decisions people live with. Fitting a board into a fixed shape is engineering.
- LIFETIME
In service for years, and near doors, water and fire
Updates, cloud environments and access rights are kept up long after launch. When a system guards a door or a water pipe, they are security matters.
The system map
One product, four places it has to behave
A smart home product lives in the room, on the household’s network, in a cloud service and on a phone.
PRODUCT
in the roomBoard, radios, firmware and enclosure. It is placed once and then left alone, so setup, recovery and update behaviour have to be built in before it ships.
Hand over Hardware & Electronics Hand over Embedded & FirmwareHOME NETWORK
in the wallsBluetooth LE for setup, Wi-Fi to the router, and a radio to the hub where the product joins one. Every link belongs to the household, not to the maker.
CLOUD
run by the makerAccounts, device state and the update jobs that reach every home. A two-way path, not only a place to store readings.
Hand over Cloud & Connected SystemsAPP
in the person’s handSetup, control and status on a phone the product does not own. It is the part of the product a person touches most.
Hand over Applications & Experience
UPDATE New firmware travels the same way in reverse: from the cloud to the product, over the household’s own network.
What has to work together
The seams between the places decide the product
Smart home integration is rarely one component failing. It is two parts designed apart, meeting in a home. The four seams below come from the example that follows.
The hub, the app and the house they serve.
Setup × app × firmware
A device is onboarded over Bluetooth LE from the app and then handed on to the cloud. The connection interface and the provisioning section of the app were built alongside the firmware, not after it.
Hub × sensors × radio
One hub, many sensors, one shared band. Radio traffic was tuned to keep latency down, and a logging system spanning several embedded processors let a fault be traced across them.
Product × other ecosystems
A universal hub has to work with what is already installed. The starting point was other makers’ technical documentation, and HomeKit, Alexa and Siri support was first proved at firmware level in proofs of concept.
Device × cloud × time
Firmware and backend were built and tested through one pipeline. Cloud environments ran from sandbox to production, update jobs delivered new firmware, versions could be rolled back, and access roles were audited.
Patterns across projects
What repeats from one home to the next
The same four things kept coming back across home and building projects. The projects are not named.
Setup is engineered, not documented
The people who install these products are not technical, so the first run was always in scope: a tank gauge homeowners can fit, an app understood without technical knowledge, a short path from device to app.
- Tank gauge
- Air-quality monitor
- Air-quality device and app
- Integrated home system
The product is fitted to where it sits
One air-quality monitor was reworked as a portable desktop unit for its second generation. The board layout was rearranged to meet fixed dimensions, and an LED scheme made air quality readable at a glance.
- Air-quality monitor, two generations
The cloud talks back
Alerts when a tank runs low or air leaves its range. Two-way communication and remote updates with the device. Update jobs across a home system.
- Tank gauge
- Air-quality device and app
- Air-quality monitor
- Integrated home system
New phones meet old buildings
A door camera’s analog video was converted on a hardware codec and streamed to a resident’s phone, in a prototype of an indoor intercom.
- Indoor intercom, prototype
What this has looked like
One example, and what Indeema owned in it
The client and the product are not named.
The first-run experience, as a person goes through it.
- ONBOARD · HUB RADIO · CLOUD · UPDATEIntegrated smart-home system: hub, sensors, cloud and app
A company that already sold a water-leak detection product wanted a full smart-home system: energy monitoring, lighting, door locks, fire alarms and heating. It had clear requirements, a leak product with limited device integration, and many sensors without optimised communication.
- Indeema owned
- Embedded firmware, beginning with proofs of concept; the Bluetooth LE connection interface and provisioning section of the app; cloud environments on AWS; build and deployment pipelines; UX design; testing.
- What changed
- A universal hub that works with the devices the client listed. Onboarding over Bluetooth LE. Tuned radio traffic between sensors and hub. Logging across several embedded processors. Update jobs and reviewed access roles after launch.
- The hard part
- Working with other makers’ devices from their technical documentation alone, and keeping many sensors talking to one hub without lag.
- The team
- Embedded, cloud and DevOps, mobile, UX and QA engineers, working with the client’s teams in other countries.
Where to start
Start with the home your product has to live in
Connected Product Engineering
The same one-system discipline for any product that spans device, cloud and app.
Product Discovery & Technical Strategy
Settle the conditions of the home before the first board is drawn.
Bring us
- The product, and where in a home or building it sits
- Who installs it, and how
- What it must work with once installed