From securing your home while hundreds of miles away and keeping your beer cold to make sure that your tropical fish are comfortable, smart home devices can perform tasks that are, frankly, nothing short of miraculous. And given all that a smart home can do, you’d think that getting set up would require a team of highly skilled professionals, right? Not so with Ezlo. In fact, with easy-to-install Ezlo devices, you can make your home smarter, yourself, quicker than you can say, “Dim the living room lights, Siri.” So, where is the best place to start? An edge computing hub.
Build your automation with computing at the edge.
What’s an edge computing hub? Most smart home device providers are still using the traditional hub or controller. Edge computing, like a hub, is to smart home devices what a modem is to your home Wi-Fi, providing the signal — and the instructions — to your smart devices. After all, they may be smart, but they’re not THAT smart. They need to be told what to do, and you provide instructions to them via the hub. Okay, so why do I need edge computing instead of a hub? What’s the difference?
With a home automation system driven by a hub that computes “at the edge,” instead of the traditional hub, all of the data that moves between your smart devices is processed locally, by your edge hub. Why does this matter? There are several reasons, the first and foremost of which is that traditional hubs don’t help your devices talk amongst themselves. They need to do this in order to operate. It’s the data passed between them, and the hub, that gives them the power to do what you want them to do… like monitor a backyard camera, or tell you that you’re spending more than you should on electricity. An edge computer is designed to work with any device, any time, regardless of protocol, such as Zigbee and Bluetooth, or manufacturer. Now, you can be certain that not only will all of your current devices perform admirably, but so will any devices you later add to your system. There’s nothing worse than getting a bright shiny new device home only to find out that it’s not compatible with your system. With edge computing, that doesn’t happen.
Then there’s the “latency” factor or, for those who aren’t hardware developers, “the speed thing.” In a traditional, hub-centric configuration, the data transmitted between the hub and your other devices has to travel from the device up to the cloud, back down to the hub, back up to the cloud, and then back down to the device. Like everything in life, the further you need to go, the longer it takes you, right? Need an example? Probably.
A delivery person has left a package at your door. You know it’s there because you’ve installed a video doorbell camera and you saw the driver place it there via the app on your phone. Later that day, you get a notification on your phone app that someone’s at your door. When you replay the video from the doorbell camera, you see a blurred figure, whose back is already to the door, making a hasty getaway with your package. What happened? The video taken by the doorbell cam went to the cloud first, then to your phone. In the time that took, it was time enough for your package to get taken!
Now, if your doorbell camera had been paired with an edge hub, that wouldn’t have happened. Had the camera been paired, instead, with a powerful edge computer that just happens to be lightning fast, and totally reliable — like the Ezlo Plus or Ezlo Secure — the data wouldn’t have been transmitted via the cloud and you could very well have seen the face of your porch pirate. In addition to speed, both the Secure and the Plus support multiple protocols and offer the industry’s best in flexibility, connectivity, and dependability. They can even make your smart home even smarter, driving the more sophisticated devices such as cameras and door locks, with greater efficiency. Oh, and did we mention security? Edge computing offers an added layer of data security. With edge computing, data never transfers to the cloud; that’s why there is less chance of private information being hijacked and stolen.
So, making your home smarter doesn’t need to be expensive, stressful or complicated; all it takes is choosing the right devices. Ready to start making smart choices when choosing your home automation devices? Start with an Ezlo hub. Visit us at ezlo.com to learn more.
