Meet the Jensens
Mark, who cannot hear the doorbell but never misses a visitor. Sophie, who wants one message when the house is empty, not forty. Daan, who has never switched off a light in his life. And Emma, the family nerd, who taught twenty years of mismatched gadgets, an old Mac and a Raspberry Pi to speak one language.
A family with a home treated like a family member: it knows their habits, keeps their secrets and answers to them alone. No cloud. No subscription. No brand in charge.
What the Jensens wanted was not another app. They wanted a house that behaves the way this family lives: a porch light that greets a visitor, a doorbell that reaches Mark with light and a tap on his wrist, curtains that close at sunset, lamps that go out when the last one leaves. A house that knows their habits, keeps their secrets and answers to them alone. No cloud, no subscription, no brand in charge.
A Brief History of Home Automation
Over the last few decades home automation, or domotica, has become increasingly popular. People wanted more than a manually operated switch on the wall and technology vendors saw their opportunity. Soon they were competing with one another, overwhelming homeowners with new ideas, technologies, services and products.
Each came with its own promises, benefits and concerns. Unfortunately, comparing them was often confusing because they were not always addressing the same problems. Sometimes the innovation concerned a wireless communication protocol, sometimes the architecture, cloud services, hubs, apps, speech recognition, intelligence, transparency or interoperability. And then there were all the other fancy technologies vendors used to promote their products.
For homeowners, adopting new technology frequently meant abandoning some of what they already had and moving on to the next generation. Many vendors also tried to protect their products through proprietary technology, preventing devices from different manufacturers or generations from communicating with one another.
This article takes a brief look at some of these technologies, explaining their benefits and concerns.
What about the future?
The launch of the Homylon Engine is most likely not the end. It runs already for a long time on real test sites but no doubt fixes and improvements are inevitable like with any software.
The example agents and tools get less priority. As said earlier, the whole point of Homylon is that you only run agents you need based on the stuff you have and do the smartest possible things with them.
Having said that, there are a few more Homylon tools in the closet and ready for exposure as well. Watch this site for news about that.
A Windows Engine is in the making but needs some time.
One big show-off application may also emerge. Al lot of existing example-agent software could be built in the Engine. A HomylonSuite application (HomylonSweet?) could have a Monitor, Editor, Sound and a MQTT agent included for a jump start.
On a Mac? Linux? Who knows.
Stay tuned.