What Is Smart Home? Details Explained.

In recent years, smart home, smart community, and smart life have become a hot topic. The traditional home furnishing industry, home appliance industry, real estate developers and Internet enterprises are scrambling to enter the field of smart home. At present, with the involvement of more and more manufacturers, the products and technologies in the area of smart home have been more and more mature, and intelligent family life has become a new goal pursued by modern families.

So what is smart home? Let’s talk about a few concepts about smart home.

1. What is smart home?

What is smart home? Smart home is taking the family residence as the platform. It integrates generic cabling technology, security technology, network communication technology, automatic control technology, audio and video technology to build an efficient and intelligent residential facility and family daily affairs management system. While being environmental-friendly and energy-saving, it can improve safety, convenience, comfort and home life efficiency.

Smart home is not a simple combination of a single intelligent device but an integrated system. Through the Internet of things technology, it connects all the light, sound and electrical equipment in the home, such as lighting, audio, TV, refrigerator, air conditioner, washing machine, electric fan, electric doors and windows, and even gas pipeline, to provide video monitoring, intelligent anti-theft alarm and intelligent lighting Intelligent electrical control, intelligent door and window control, intelligent video control, etc. Users only need to use tablet computers, tablet phones, smartphones and laptops to remotely watch the home monitoring screen, and control the lights, curtains, electrical appliances, etc. in real-time.

2. What is smart home appliance?

As a new type of household electrical appliance, Smart home is a product formed by introducing microprocessors, sensor technology, and network communication technology into home appliances. It has the function of intuitive perception, sensing the state of residential space, the state of home appliances themselves, and home appliances service status. It also has the functions of automatic control, automatic adjustment, and receiving remote control information.

As an integral part of smart home, smart home appliances are not a single intelligent product. Other home appliances and household facilities can also interconnect them to form a complete smart home system and help people realize intelligent life.

Compared with traditional home appliances, smart home appliances have the following characteristics.

• Networking

Smart appliances can be connected through home LAN, and can also be connected to the manufacturer’s service site through the home gateway interface, and finally connected with the Internet to realize the transmission and sharing of information.

• Intellectual

Intelligent home appliances can be set and controlled automatically according to the residential space environment and user needs. For example, intelligent air conditioning can automatically adjust its working state according to different seasons, climates, and user regions, to achieve the best effect.

• Compatible

As smart home appliances may come from different manufacturers, the smart home appliance platform must be developable and compatible to realize information sharing and interconnection.

• Energy saving

Smart home appliances can automatically adjust working hours and working status based on the surrounding environment to realize energy saving.

3. What is internet of things?

Internet of things is for the purpose of perception, using local network or Internet and other communication technology to connect sensors, controllers, machines, people and things through a new way to achieve the connection between people, people and things, things and things, to build an information-based, remote management and control and intelligent network

There are three key technologies in the application of Internet of things.

• Sensor technology

Sensor technology is the key technology of the Internet of things and the key technology in computer application. Since the advent of computers, sensors need to convert analog signals into digital signals before processing them.

• RFID technology

RFID technology combines radiofrequency technology and embedded technology, which has a broad application prospect in automatic identification and logistics management.

• Embedded system technology

Embedded system technology is a complex technology that integrates computer hardware and software, sensor technology, circuit integration technology and electronic application technology.

4. What is cloud computing?

Cloud is a metaphor for the network and the Internet. It is a new computing method based on the Internet, with a computing power of 10 trillion times per second. This way, it can provide shared software and hardware resources and information to computers on demand and other equipment. Cloud computing can be divided into several types, such as primary platform, management center, application center, and security center.

For smart homes, all functions of cloud computing are based on the Internet and mobile Internet. A typical cloud computing provider will provide general network business applications, accessed through other software or Web services, and data is stored on the server.

Smart home is a small Internet of Things. It has a large hardware group that collects vast amounts of data and information. The stability and reliability of this information must be based on the right hardware. This requires storage devices with sufficient capacity. If there is not enough capacity storage equipment, it will be difficult to store information, and even lead to a large amount of loss of information and data. Therefore, cloud computing came into being, gathering massive data to realize smart homes’ automatic management.

Cloud computing is a commercialized ultra-large-scale distributed computing technology, that is, users can automatically split the required massive computing processing program into countless smaller sub-programs through the existing network, and then transfer them to multiple servers. After searching, calculating, and analyzing, the result of processing will be sent back to the user. Its characteristics are as follows.

• Begin to take shape

Google cloud computing currently has more than 1 million servers, and the “clouds” of Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Yahoo, etc. all have hundreds of thousands of servers. This shows that the “cloud” has begun to take shape.

• Immateriality

“Cloud” is not a fixed, tangible entity. Users don’t need to know or worry about the specific location of the application. They only need a laptop or a mobile phone to achieve everything they need through network services.

• Reliability

“Cloud” uses measures such as fault tolerance of multiple copies of data and interchangeability of computing nodes to ensure service reliability.

• Generally applicable

Cloud computing can construct ever-changing applications, and the same “cloud” can support the operation of different applications at the same time.

• Scalability

The scale of “cloud” can be dynamically scaled to meet application and user scale growth needs.

• On-demand service

“Cloud” is a vast resource pool, and users only need to purchase it on demand.

• Low cost

“Cloud” has low-cost advantages, and its versatility and fault-tolerance measures can reduce a lot of costs. Therefore, enterprises do not have to bear high costs.