Recently I was going through the various Smart Thing products that can help build a smart home.
Below table is the output.
( Disclaimer: This is a point in time view, as of April 2015 and I do not intend to keep it up to date by editing every now and then )
| Commercial name of the company or the Internet of Things product or platform |
Is there a Hub Included ? (Hardware & Software)
|
Sensors included or Does have pre-built drivers for common hardware?
|
Sensor to Hub Protocols supported.
|
Cloud and APIs
|
Apps and SDK
|
Availability & Price
|
|
RelayR WUnderbar
|
The product consists of a hub and six sensor modules. | Six sensor modules are packaged together. | MQTT, CoAP, OMA Lightweight M2M | Cloud APIs support device control and data access | Android or iOS. Libraries for node.js, Python and C# are available. WebJS, Ruby and more will be supported soon | USD $199 |
|
Ninja Block & Ninja Sphere
|
NinjaBlock and NinjaSphere is the hub module. It has an Ubuntu OS at the core of the Hub Appliance. Connects to the ninja cloud using MQTT.
|
Lot of common sensor connectivity is pre-built into the hub-device.
– hue
– ge smart bulb
– chromecast
– belkin smart switch
Documentation is available for implementing drivers. http://blog.ninjablocks.com/labs/writing-your-first-ninja-sphere-driver/
|
– BlueTooth
– Insteon
– Radio Frequecy
– RS232X10Z
– Wave
– ZigBee
|
Ninja Cloud provides
– Web Application (Device and data stream. No data access)
For Ninja Sphere, new version cloud API documentations are at https://developers.ninja/apireference/restapi/index.html
API Model seems to has changed from the previous version)
Issue: Data from the devices does not seem to be exposed as APIs. Only way seems to be setting up push notifications using AWS SNS. Pretty complex https://developers.ninja/apireference/cloudrpc/notifications.html )
|
– iOS SDK is in GA
– Android is in beta
|
Ninja Sphere is available for purchase USD $249+ $35 for shipping.
Ninja Blocks does not seem to be officially available any more. Deprecated.
|
|
sense.se
|
Hub is called mother.
Sensors attached to mother are called cookies.
|
Proprietary 4 types of sensors are available in the package
– motion
– presence
– temperature
– A combined sensors with all the other three capabilities
Adding custom sensors does not seem to be a possibility.
|
Internal.
|
Python based CLI tool and REST APIs are available for getting device control and events. 10 days worth data is stored on the cloud
Events can be published by sense to a registered URL. Event schema is defined in the documentation. https://sen.se/api/docs/v2/events/#base-event
|
SDK and Apps for all mobile platforms are available.
|
USD $ 299 for mother and cookies. + shipping.
|
|
Smartthings
|
Smartthings Hub is a proprietary hardware hub that comes with preinstalled software.
|
Large number of proprietary sensors are available for purchase from the smart things stores.
Adding new custom sensor should be possible but it is relatively harder. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CO5hEWFop5o)
|
Need further investigation.
|
All smart devices are connected to Samsungs centralized cloud platform.
Does not expose openly available REST APIs. (“Please contact us if you are interested in utilizing the Core API to build custom solutions.”)— source: http://docs.smartthings.com/en/latest/introduction/smartthings-architecture.html
You can write your wrappers using their SDKs to enables APIs from the cloud platform, but that does not come without effort.
|
SDK and Apps for all mobile platforms are available.
An web based app development platform http://ide.smartthings.com is also available.
These apps can be installed by consumers once they have the base smart things app already installed on their phones.
|
starter kit is available with a hub and a few sensors at $199
|
|
Twine
|
Twine is a wi-fi enabled hub and sensors for home automation.
|
– Temperature (0-140ºF, ±2º)
– Vibration (0-4G)
– Orientation (relative to the earth)
– moisture
– Sensor port for external sensors.
|
Sensors needs cabled connection to Twine hub. The applications gets messy.
|
All devices finally connect to the cloud using twine hub, which is connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi.
Do not seem to expose APIs.
There is a web interface to define IFTT style rules that can send SMS, Twits or Emails based on the events from the sensors.
|
None so far.
|
Twine + Full Sensor Package USD $149.95
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Big is Small 