Smart Home Blog

You may know how many new players are coming to the home automation scene with their solutions. But maybe half of them or less stay there. The rest become a history. CEPro gives five reasons of those faults:

• Too many features – it’s better to start from one automation area – lighting, security etc and then add another one by one.
• Software-only models – producer doesn’t care about hardware at all.
• Misguided recurring revenue plans.
• All IP – ignore others protocols such Z-Wave, ZigBee, X10 etc.
• Money – spend a lot of money to promote the product and not for product itself.

I agree with those assertions except the first one. IMHO you can produce excellent lighting control system. But you didn’t provide for possibility extending it (on architecture level) it might be very difficult to add security or media functionality. You should design the system as multi-functional from the beginning. Otherwise all extensions will be just patches. Sure, there is no reason to delay with the first release till all functionality will be implemented. It can be done step by step.

Update: New version of this article with answers for some readers questions can be found here.