How to use smart home to improve our quality of life

With the advancement and popularization of Internet of Things technology, the realization of smart home system has gradually become easier. Smart home can greatly improve people's quality of life, thanks to the improvement of home system, but how to ensure that single product is perfectly connected to your smart system?

In recent years, smart home has set off a big wave of popularity in China. After years of baptism, smart home has gone through the stage of popularization of concepts in our country. However, due to the slow development, the smart home industry has not been popularized. 85% of consumers said that they have only heard of smart home, but they don’t know what devices smart home includes and what functions it should have.

Figure 1 Smart home control system

In fact, this is also the awkward positioning of my country's smart home industry. Since the industry was introduced, there has been no unified standard to indicate what kind of needs smart homes should meet and what kind of services they can provide to consumers. Different manufacturers have different positioning. Some lighting companies, electrical appliance companies and even some curtain companies have entered the smart home market. The related products are varied and the stability of the products is lacking.

Figure 2 Lack of standards leads to uneven product performance

Wi-Fi, ZigBee, Bluetooth and other wireless communication methods each have their own advantages and disadvantages. Manufacturers have formed their own alliances and unified industry communication standards. This is an urgent problem that the smart home industry needs to solve. Only in this way can many users enjoy the convenience and smart life brought by smart homes.

Figure 3 Applicable scenarios and features of Wi-Fi, ZigBee, and Bluetooth

1.    Wi-Fi solution:

Wi-Fi technology is currently the fastest wireless transmission technology with low product cost. It is more popular in our daily life. The most convenient thing is that you only need to buy a module and connect to the Wi-Fi network to use it. Therefore, smart home products based on Wi-Fi technology currently occupy the largest market share.

Figure 4 ZLG Zhiyuan Electronics Wi-Fi module

As shown in Figure 4, this is a low-power, high-performance Wi-Fi module launched by ZLG Zhiyuan Electronics. The product adopts Broadcom wireless solution design.

Figure 5 WM6201 serial port transparent transmission

The module has a built-in Cortex-M4 core processor with a main frequency of up to 100MHz. The wireless complies with the IEEE 802.11b/g/n protocol and supports UART serial port transparent transmission. Users do not need to understand complex TCP/UDP and wireless network protocols to achieve fast networking of devices.

2. ZigBee solution

Sensors play a very important role in the ecosystem of the Internet of Things, and are even more important in the application scenarios of smart homes. For example, lighting control, curtain control, temperature control, smoke detection, and even security systems all require sensors to be implemented.

With the development of wireless network technology, the technical standards of wireless sensor networks have also been rapidly innovated and improved. ZigBee is one of them. ZigBee is a wireless network protocol for medium-distance and low-speed transmission. Its advantages are low power consumption, low cost, support for a large number of network nodes and support for multiple network topologies (point-to-point network, star network, mesh network).

Figure 6 ZigBee point-to-point, star, and mesh network topologies

ZigBee has undergone more than ten years of reform since its launch in 2001. ZigBee3.0 has unified the standards between different application profiles, allowing ZigBee devices running in different applications to interconnect and communicate with each other, opening up a connection channel for the entire Internet of Things system and greatly promoting the development of the entire Internet of Things and smart home applications.

Huawei applied to join the ZigBee Alliance on August 29, 2016, becoming a "promoter" member and obtaining a board seat. Huawei's membership in the ZigBee Alliance board of directors undoubtedly further demonstrates ZigBee's growing influence and value in the field of the Internet of Things.

Combining years of market experience and the actual needs of users in this industry, ZLG Zhiyuan has taken 80% of users' actual application needs and 90% of the protocol development time into consideration, and launched a series of low-power, cost-effective ZigBee modules based on NXP JN516X wireless microcontrollers.

Its greatest features are strong practicality, high transmission efficiency, reliable and stable performance, simple secondary development, and flexible engineering network layout.

3. Bluetooth solution

Bluetooth technology should be another key wireless transmission technology after Wi-Fi and ZigBee in smart home application scenarios. It is usually used for short-distance wireless communication between different devices. Like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth technology has evolved for nearly 20 years, from BT1.0, BT2.0, BT3.0, BT4.0 to the latest BT5.0. The Bluetooth Technology Alliance (SIG) has proposed the "Bluetooth Low Energy" (BLE) operation mode in the Bluetooth 4.0 standard specification. The Bluetooth Technology Alliance further launched the Bluetooth 4.1 technical specification at the end of 2013. Its main purpose is to make Bluetooth Smart technology eventually become the core driving force for the development of the Internet of Things.

The ZLG9021 series Bluetooth module is a low-cost, low-power and small-size BLE module launched by ZLG Zhiyuan Electronics, which complies with the Bluetooth 4.0 standard.

The module has a complete built-in wireless protocol stack and supports serial port transparent transmission mode. Users can use it quickly without complicated RF hardware design or wireless protocol development, which greatly reduces R&D investment and shortens product development cycle.

The standards, specifications and protocols of the Internet of Things may require a long process of rectification and improvement. Of course, new technologies are still being developed, and it is foreseeable that the compatibility between each specification will become better and better.

And through the efforts of IoT product developers, products that support multiple transmission technologies and multiple specifications will become mainstream. Before a single wireless network transmission technology and specification unifies the entire IoT system, products that are compatible with multiple transmission technologies and specifications can respond to market changes and not be limited by the established framework.

Will there be a unified standard for the Internet of Things in the future? No one can provide a clear answer at the moment.

However, diverse and creative products and applications can enable everything to be more freely interconnected and bring more convenience to human life. This is the goal that all scientists, software and hardware equipment developers, specification setters and solution providers will work hard for in the future.