Making Home Automation Real and Easily Attainable
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to come home at the end of the day to a house that has adjusted the thermostat to your preference and turned on the lights to welcome you back?
Yes, it is true, you can do this now, but it hasn’t always been this easy. In January at CES 2019, Legrand announced its Smart Lighting Controls for their Radiant Collection. The Radiant Collection incorporates Smart Lighting that is ready to connect with and seamlessly works with other OCF-certified IoT devices regardless of brand or operating system.
These lighting devices are the first to be certified from the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) and these smart switches, dimmers and outlets can be controlled remotely via the Legrand Smart Lights application or within the home through voice-enabled assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Home.
“We have the smartest technology built right in,” said Brian DiBella, President, Electrical Wiring Systems at Legrand North America. “With the capability of connecting smart devices from other manufacturers, homeowners simply speak commands and enable activation of doors, thermostats, and lighting for an entire smart home experience.”
The benefits of a smart, connected world are plentiful; however, for the IoT to keep progressing and work to its fullest potential, the industry needs to unify around a single approach to connectivity. This approach to easy, out-of-the-box connectivity is in line with Legrand and OCF’s commitment to developing products that are open, interoperable and secure.
Why OCF’s Smart Home Specification?
As Mr. DiBella explains, the Internet has been around for several decades and there is a clear blueprint established in terms of what works, what hasn’t worked, and how to do it.
Legrand’s IoT approach is to follow in the footsteps of Internet technologies that are proven and analyzed, showing how they have held up over time.
In the early days of the Internet, you dialed into the Internet via service providers such as AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe. These services were proprietary and provided closed environments that did not allow for much innovation.
The standards, however that were established such as IP addresses and the HTML common language helped move the Internet forward.
Mr. DiBella describes how In the IoT world, the OCF specification is the HTML of the “physical things world.” OCF provides an open platform where you don’t have to worry about a new piece of hardware requiring you to write a special driver that will interact correctly or need to change other parts of the system. OCF takes away this cumbersome process of making changes that fit with proprietary protocols.
Contemporary Solutions: The Great Period of Unification
Again, having a single unified approach to securing communications in IoT is the direction the industry must go. The benefits of unification are solutions that are developed with security in mind and “We need to democratize IoT interoperability so that everyone can play, and they have a set of clear rules and the confidence that it’s going to work the way ‘things’ are supposed to,” said DiBella. The industry needs a protocol that will make IoT a reality and OCF is making this real – it’s making the bridge that is needed for devices to communicate securely and seamlessly.”