Smart home is the embodiment of the Internet of Things under the influence of the Internet. Smart homes connect various devices in the home (such as lighting systems, audio and video equipment, air conditioning control, curtain control, security systems, digital cinema systems, audio and video servers, cabinet systems, network appliances, etc.) through IoT technology, providing multiple functions of programmable timing control and detection.

Compared with ordinary homes, smart homes not only have traditional residential functions, but also include building, network communication, information appliances, equipment automation, providing comprehensive information exchange functions, and even saving funds for various energy costs.

Development History

As a new industry, smart home is at a critical point between the introduction and growth stages, and the market consumption concept has not yet formed. However, with the further promotion and popularization of the smart home market, the consumption potential of the smart home market is bound to be enormous. As a result, excellent domestic smart home manufacturing enterprises are increasingly emphasizing research on the industry market, especially in-depth research on the development environment of enterprises and changes in customer demand trends. A large number of excellent domestic smart home brands are rapidly rising. Smart homes in China have undergone nearly 12 years of development, which has gone through four stages: the embryonic stage, the pioneering stage, the wandering stage, and the integration and evolution stage.

(1) Sprout period [1994-1999] This was the first stage of development for smart homes in China, and the entire industry was still in a stage of conceptual familiarity and product recognition. At this time, there were no professional smart home manufacturers, only one or two companies in Shenzhen engaged in the sales of X-10 smart homes in the United States, engaged in import retail business, and their products were mostly sold to European and American users living in China

(2) During the pioneering period from 2000 to 2005, more than 50 smart home R&D and production enterprises were established in China, mainly concentrated in Shenzhen, Shanghai, Tianjin, Beijing, Hangzhou, Xiamen and other places. The marketing and technical training system for smart homes is gradually improving, and at this stage, foreign smart home products have basically not entered the domestic market

(3) The wandering period from 2006 to 2010 was caused by the wild growth and vicious competition of smart home enterprises in the previous stage, which brought great negative impacts to the smart home industry, including exaggerating the functions of smart homes without achieving this effect, manufacturers only focusing on developing agents but neglecting training and support for agents, resulting in difficulties in agent operation, and unstable products leading to high user complaint rates. Industry users and media have begun to question the actual effectiveness of smart homes, shifting from advocating to being cautious. Market sales have also slowed down in recent years, and some regions have even experienced a decline in sales

(4) Since entering the period of integration and evolution from 2011 to 2020, the market has clearly seen growth momentum, and the major industry background is the regulation of real estate. The massive growth of smart homes indicates that the smart home industry has entered a turning point, from a period of stagnation to a new round of integration and evolution. In the next three to five years, smart homes will enter a relatively rapid development stage on the one hand, and on the other hand, protocols and technical standards will begin to actively communicate and integrate. Industry mergers and acquisitions will emerge and even become mainstream

Design philosophy

The key to the development of smart home control lies in design concepts and the mindset of operators. Operators of smart home control systems should adhere to the concept of putting consumers first, with a mentality of starting from customer interests, and with a serious, responsible, and honest attitude, truly starting from the actual needs of customers, to provide smart home control design and solutions for customers, so that customers can get maximum benefits with the least amount of money.

Design Principles

Measuring the success of an intelligent system in a residential area does not only depend on the number of intelligent systems, the progressiveness or integration of the system, but also depends on whether the design and configuration of the system is economical and reasonable, whether the system can operate successfully, whether the use, management and maintenance of the system are convenient, and whether the technology of the system or product is mature and applicable. In other words, it is how to achieve the maximum efficiency with the least investment and the most simple way to achieve convenient and high-quality life.

In order to achieve the above goals, the design of smart home systems should follow the following principles:

1. Practical and convenient

The fundamental goal of smart homes is to provide people with a comfortable, safe, convenient, and efficient living environment. For smart home products, the most important thing is to focus on practicality and abandon those flashy but impractical functions that can only be used as decorations. Products should prioritize practicality, ease of use, and humanization.

2. Reliability

The various intelligent subsystems of the entire building should be able to operate 24 hours a day, and the safety, reliability, and fault tolerance of the system must be highly valued. Take corresponding fault-tolerant measures for each subsystem in terms of power supply, system backup, etc., to ensure the normal and safe use, good quality, and performance of the system, and to have the ability to cope with various complex environmental changes.

3. Standardization

The design of smart home system solutions should be carried out in accordance with relevant national and regional standards to ensure the scalability and expandability of the system. Standard TCP/IP protocol network technology should be used for system transmission to ensure compatibility and interconnection between systems from different manufacturers. The front-end devices of the system are multifunctional, open, and expandable devices. If the system host, terminal, and module adopt standardized interface design, it provides an integrated platform for external manufacturers of home intelligent systems, and its functions can be expanded. When additional functions are needed, there is no need to excavate the pipeline network, which is simple, reliable, and convenient to save.

4. Convenience

Whether the wiring installation is simple directly affects the issues of cost, scalability, and maintainability. It is necessary to choose a system with simple wiring, which can be wired together with the community broadband during construction, simple and easy; The equipment is easy to learn and master, and easy to operate and maintain. The convenient design of the system in engineering installation and debugging is also very important. The significant feature of home intelligence is that the workload of installation, debugging, and maintenance is very large, requiring a large amount of manpower and material resources, which has become a bottleneck restricting the development of the industry.

development trend

With the rapid development of smart homes, more and more homes are introducing intelligent systems and devices. The content covered by intelligent systems has also evolved from a simple approach to a combination of multiple methods.

The subsystem operates independently without the interaction platform

In the smart home interaction platform, each subsystem can operate independently when disconnected from the interaction platform, such as building intercom, home alarm, various electrical control, access control, home entertainment, etc. Each subsystem operates under the management of the interactive platform, which can collect operational data from each subsystem and facilitate system linkage.

The control transmission protocol can interact through the platform

Thanks to the interactive platform, different subsystems can work together and exchange and share data under the unified management of the handover platform, giving users maximum choice and fully reflecting the personalization of smart homes.

Intelligent terminals serve as the operating interface for various subsystems

The entire system operates under the control and management of the platform, and the intelligent terminal (touch screen) only serves as the display and operation interface for each subsystem. Multi intelligent terminal configuration is easy and feasible. The interactive platform can record and store the operational data of various systems, providing effective historical data for the system's operation. At the same time, based on the historical operational data, it can summarize the owner's usage habits and certain rules, allowing the system to learn on its own.

■ Programmable control software provides information services

With information services, it brings more "wisdom" to smart homes, provides more information and news to our lives, and gives smart homes more vivid life. It is a higher level of smart home. The content of information services includes: health, cooking, transportation information, daily knowledge, infant and toddler care, children's education, daily shopping, community information, home control experts, etc. Smart homes are no longer just control oriented systems, but systems that organically combine information services and control.

Multiple control methods

In daily home life, in order to enable us to control the control system of the home at any time and obtain the necessary information at any time, the form of the operating terminal is very important. Various forms of intelligent operating terminals are essential, such as smart remote controllers, mobile touch screens, computers, mobile phones, PDAs, etc. With the development of cloud technology, smart home control software that integrates cloud voice control into control systems has emerged on the market. It does not require professional equipment, and can be installed on any smartphone or tablet. It is compatible with Windows, IOS, and Android systems. By opening the mobile software and enabling the monitoring mode, it can communicate with the system to control electrical equipment within the coverage range of the sound field.