We here at Athom have recently completed a successful Kickstarter campaign for our first product, Homey. In essence, it’s a device that you place in your house, and it listens to your voice. It has 8 wireless transceivers onboard, so it talks all languages.
Homey is not tied to any specific brand or standard, as I strongly believe that technology should work together in a seamless way. Nowadays, with all these ‘smart’ devices, the opposite is happening! Oh, and did I already mention that it’s plain ridiculous that you now need a smartphone to switch a light?
And… so we developed Homey! Having raised over €200.000 on Kickstarter, we’re currently super busy with manufacturing the device!
It works on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module, which is connected to the wireless transceivers, a speaker and a microphone array. On top, it runs Node.js which allows developers to add support easily! Why Node.js? As every developer or someone with a burning desire to build, Node.js is becoming the go-to coding method for enterprise. Innovators from the app and cloud side of things have utilized it in their early adoption to build out Yammer.com, Walmart.com, Paypal.com, Dailymail.co.uk, Netflix, and much more. Node.js helps bring forth rapid innovation and delivery, which is enabling the speed of delivery and prototyping. The nimble ability to iterate are the key traits of keeping the cycle of innovation moving forward. This is why our Homey platform is built integrally around this community of Node.js to plug into this top notch world of agile developers.
Packed with anything that is connected, the network effect of community is also always important. This is why we made Homey so compatible to help facilitate [like a nexus] the widely diverse ecosystem of connected devices. The open-source community of Arduino is a perfect union. Importantly, Homey is fully compatible — it plays into this developer and Maker community base to help fulfill and stretch the creativity and imaginations of the millions of Makers who may take on the ideas of their devices fitted with various Arduino variants (Arduino Uno, Arduino Mega, LilyPad Arduino, Arduino Nano, Arduino Due, Arduino Yún, Arduino Robot, Arduino Shields, and more) many of which are using IoT community inspired Atmel based AVR and ARM based processor cores. Helping to produce the heterogeneous make-up of a fuller installation of IoT, it’s a perfect union!
For all of you Arduino fans: Homey (at its true nature, acting as a nexus to the diverse set of protocols) is designed to work with Arduino! We ship transceivers with Homey [if you select that option], and we will then provide you a library for Arduino so you can access this massive community (using Maker boards as well as shields) to connect your own projects to Homey. You can be quickly on your way to a connected, SMART design packaged with a wider IoT enablement (fulfilling various protocols).
For example, if you connect a LED strip to an Arduino, and tell Homey to “turn the lights to red,” Homey will forward this command to your own Node.js app, which then sends the signal ‘red’ or ‘255,0,0’ to your Arduino. The Homey-Arduino library then will pass this command on to your own Arduino code, where you can tell the LEDs to turn to red. Basically, what I’m trying to say here is that you don’t have to do that much!
Stay tuned for upcoming posts about Homey, where there will be in-depth discussions around the hardware. In the meantime, don’t forget to pre-order your Homey!
Atmel | Bits & Pieces 