A Gateway Solution for Home Automation

THE SCENARIO:

Nowadays, domotic systems integrated on smart houses and offices are becoming ubiquitous and need specific applications to manage a huge amount of data in real-time and a high level of security against cyber attacks. Furthermore, the final user should control the entirety of his sensors and IoT devices without worrying about these aspects, only focusing on user experience and easy-learning services.

THE CONTEXT:

Generally, the home automation devices (like sensors and actuators for lighting, energy monitoring, etc.) are connected towards a daisy chain through a proprietary bus, yet it is essential to properly collect data and sensitive information: the trade-off, therefore, is focused among security, responsiveness, ease-of-use, and scalability. To achieve this goal, the final system has to be able to convert bus inputs in user-centered information, available via app or dedicated panels and accessible within the cloud. The device able to accomplish with this central task is called a gateway.

DAVE Embedded Systems' KEY ROLE:

DAVE Embedded System, with its acknowledged expertise on hardware and software project-related technologies, has a deep Know-How on various technologies such as the so-called AMP (Asymmetric Multi-Processing: a single SOC with dual integrated CPU architectures, a Cortex-A9 CPU with Linux and a Cortex-M4 CPU with bare-metal application) solutions and hardware authentications mechanism (Secure Boot). The selected processor for this project was the NXP i.MX6 SoloX due to its SOC architecture.

ABOUT THE CUSTOMER:

The Company operates in the Home Automation market segment and was looking for a partner able to work on specific tasks as explained before and available to join this project like an additional branch of their technical office, allowing them to focus on high-level management (cloud, application, and marketing). The collaboration led to improved technologies development, able to manage the huge amount of data and information required in this project and ready to face the future of home automation.

APPLICATION BLOCK DIAGRAM: