Very few people today seem to have completed a Smart Home conversion; instead they have a few devices here and there in a way that doesn’t present a complete platform. The customers we speak to generally have multiple apps and each device connects to a separate provider’s cloud service to be controlled by its dedicated app.

In the case of one of our founders, he literally has three different devices from a same manufacturer that each have a separate app and probably connect to their own cloud – a washer and dryer, a room air conditioner, and a ceiling fan. This is crazy to us. This is how and why we started to create the Unity controller – to fix this (and similar problems).

By having a single controller or hub at the home, you can have it talk to all the Things in the house and let a single app control everything. The Unity Controller by ElectraPort supports over 2,800 different Things at release. This allows for Rules and automations that we’ll cover in more detail in future posts.

Many, if not most, of the customers we speak to don’t realize that if Internet connectivity to the location where the device is operating is broken, then the device will be out of control. It might stop working at all, or it might be stuck in the state it was in when the Internet went out of service.  During product development we heard of more than one situation where a manufacturer/cloud provider went out of business, leaving their customers wholly unable to use the purchased products. It’s one thing if the company that sells you a hammer goes out of business. The hammer still works and you can still use it. 

It also makes sense that if a cloud service provider goes out of business, you can’t access their cloud service anymore. If Google went out of business Lehman-brothers-style, nobody would expect to still be able to access their GMail account. So, one purpose of a home-based controller is to insulate the homeowner from both Internet outages and the manufacturer going out of business or having an outage in their cloud. Just because a company is great at manufacturing hardware doesn’t mean they’re great at operating cloud services. 

A home-based controller for your Smart Home is a wise investment in security. Most products in the market today aren’t that interested in security; they can’t be. There is no security context when four people in your home might have the app that can turn a given lightbulb on and off. Does the manufacturer provide the ability to tie user accounts together with centralized administrator control? Would this need to be accomplished for each product owned in the Smart Home? How painful would this be to manage over time?

In the case of a properly-designed Controller like the ElectraPort Unity, Smart Homeowners have the ability to create accounts for all the occupants of each Asset. In some cases they might be tenants in an AirBnB or rental property, with limited access except to turn limited things on and off and view status. Other users might be in parent or child roles and be able to act accordingly. 

For all these reasons and more, we clearly recommend that anyone starting a new Smart Home installation spend some time figuring out which controller to use, and not whether they should use a controller. As this series continues we’ll dive more deeply into specifics on why ElectraPort.