Waveshare ESP32-S3-Relay-6CH is a 6-channel WiFi and Bluetooth relay module based on Espressif Systems ESP32-S3 wireless microcontroller that also supports RS485 control and comes with headers taking Raspberry Pi Pico HATs adding RTC, CAN Bus, RS232, LoRa, sensors, or other features. The relays are rated 250VAC/30VDC up to 10A, the system take 7V to 36V DC input through a terminal block, and can be programmed with Arduino or MicroPython though a USB-C port. It also features a a built-in buzzer, an RGB LED, and is housed in a DIN Rail-mountable ABS case. Waveshare ESP32-S3-Relay-6CH specifications: Wireless module – ESP32-S3-WROOM-1U-N8 by default MCU – ESP32-S3 dual-core Tensilica LX7 up to 240 MHz with 512KB SRAM Storage – 8MB Quad SPI flash Wireless – 2.4 GHz WiFi 4 and Bluetooth LE 5 u.FL connector for external antenna 6x relays via terminal blocks Rating – Up to 10A 250V AC / 30V DC [...]
SparkFun has launched yet another ESP32-C6 board with the “Thing Plus – ESP32-C6” based on the ESP32-C6-WROOM-1-N16 module with 16MB flash and a PCB antenna and range of I/Os and power options. The board features 28 through holes with up to 23 multi-function GPIOs and a Qwicc connector for expansion, and supports 5V or LiPo battery power through respectively a USB-C port a 2-pin JST connector combined with a charging chip, and a fuel gauge. SparkFun Thing Plus – ESP32-C6 specifications: Wireless module – ESP32-C6-WROOM-1-N16 MCU – ESP32-C6 32-bit single-core RISC-V microcontroller with 2.4 GHz WiFI 6, Bluetooth 5 LE, and 802.15.4 radio (Zigbee and Thread); Matter-compatible Storage – 16 MB flash PCB Antenna Storage – MicroSD card slot USB – 1x USB Type-C port for power and programming Expansion 12-pin + 16-pin headers with 23x multifunctional GPIOs Up to 7x 12-bit ADC channels Up to 2x UART channels (with [...]
In 2021, the average household had 25 connected devices, a massive increase on previous years, driven in no small part by the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns. And in 2023, the number of smart homes worldwide looks set to hit 195.8 million.
We’re living through a fascinating time for technology in general, with new breakthroughs hitting the headlines all the time, and the home automation industry is especially exciting.
In this article, we’ll dive into some of the main ways home automation is changing in 2023, some of the biggest current trends, and what’s on the horizon.
Emerging trends in home automation in 2023
2023 so far has been a big year for home automation, and there looks to be more to come. Let’s take a look at some of the most interesting emerging trends this year.
On top of that, the tech behind these gadgets is also developing fast, with new features emerging all the time. Today’s voice assistants are already a far cry from the first few generations of Amazon Alexa gadgets, and are capable of integrating with multiple devices and recognizing a range of different voices.
Edge computing and local processing
“Edge computing” refers to when data processing and analysis take place closer to the source of data generation (locally) rather than on centralized cloud servers somewhere else.
In the context of home automation, this means IoT devices can process the data they generate right there and then. This has a number of advantages, such as:
Low latency, because the data doesn’t have to travel all the way to a data center and back. This means tasks can be performed much quicker, and even in real-time.
Better bandwidth efficiency and reduced costs because only relevant information is shared over the network.
Better scalability, making it easier to add more devices to your smart home network.
Let’s check out a few examples of edge computing at work in smart homes.
Voice assistants like Amazon Echos with built-in processing capabilities are capable of handling voice commands locally, making them much more responsive and able to function smoothly even with the internet connection is unstable.
Security cameras can analyze video footage locally instead of sending that data to the cloud for analysis. This makes it easier to detect and report suspicious activity with much faster response times.
Managing things like lighting and temperature even when offline, keeping your working and living spaces in the most comfortable state at all times.
AI and machine learning
AI is a hot topic right now, and at times it can be hard to separate the truly exciting developments from the hype.
When it comes to home automation, though, AI holds a ton of promise.
Energy efficiency: AI can track the energy usage in your smart home appliances and make adjustments to ensure nothing is being wasted. It can also detect problems and unusual activity and take steps to correct any issues.
AI can add a touch of personalization to your smart home by learning your preferences and making automatic adjustments to things like temperature, lighting, and music.
Predictive maintenance: AI can monitor your smart home devices and predict when faults and issues are about to occur, helping you avoid outages and make repairs before they’re needed.
Sustainable and eco-friendly automation
We already briefly talked about how technologies like AI can help your smart home devices function more efficiently. In fact, smart heating and cooling systems, used correctly, can save users 50% of their energy consumption in some cases.
But that’s not the only way home automation can help you live more sustainably. For example, you can integrate your smart home with green energy sources like solar — something that’s becoming more common around the world.
What’s in store for the near future?
Now we’ve explored a few of the exciting things happening in home automation right now, let’s turn our gaze to the near future.
What can smart home owners look forward to over the next few years? This is where things get really interesting, as the rapid development of smart technologies mean things are changing fast.
Continued growth of 5G
5G technology looks set to grow in both popularity and sophistication throughout the next decade.
According to Ericsson’s 2022 Mobility Report, 5G subscriptions will reach 4.4 billion globally by the end of 2027, and account for around 48% of total mobile subscriptions.
For smart home owners, this means even faster connectivity, lower latency, and support for increasingly powerful and sophisticated IoT devices that aren’t possible just yet, as well as the opportunity to build more complex and connected smart home networks.
Augmented reality and virtual reality in smart homes
The AR and VR market is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 13.72% between 2023 and 2027, which has a ton of exciting implications for home automation.
One example here is smart home maintenance. Augmented reality apps can make it much easier to repair faulty devices by providing real-time, 3D instructions that are far clearer than any manual or YouTube tutorial. AR can also be used to improve home design by helping you visualize how new furniture, decorations, and layouts will look before committing to them.
Even better security and privacy features
Keeping our families, homes, and possessions safe is always going to be a primary concern, and smart technology here is developing in some really interesting ways.
One example is the use of biometric tech to improve home security. The global biometrics market is projected to hit $83 billion by 2027, with voice recognition alone expected to reach $27 billion.
What does this mean for smart homes? Biometrics can be used to identify people with extremely accurate levels of precision, allowing you to enter your home with just your fingerprint, a scan of your iris, or even a voice command — while keeping everyone else out.
Other promising trends in smart home security include advances in data encryption and privacy controls to keep your IoT devices secure.
AI-powered home health monitoring
Keeping track of your vital signs and health metrics is more than just a hobby for fitness enthusiasts — for older people and those with health issues it can literally be life-saving.
Wearable devices like smart watches can track key health data, issue reminders to take medication, and alert emergency services when things go wrong. These devices can even be used to monitor individuals’ movement patterns and predict falls and other accidents.
We’re still some way off fully automated health care, but this is a step in the right direction.
Entire smart cities
Cities around the world are getting bigger, and that means they need to get smarter.
Home automation isn’t just for houses and apartments — it can be scaled up to the size of a city, a trend which is well underway. The global smart cities market is expected to grow at an annual compound rate of 13.13% until at least 2028.
Smart cities use technology like 5G, the Internet of Things, and AI to build more efficient, safe, and pleasant environments for millions of people to share. These technologies drive features such as:
Better connectivity for everyone, like accessible WiFi anywhere in the city including on transport.
More efficient and better-connected public transport systems, including more intelligent traffic management based on constant monitoring using sensors.
More efficient usage of energy, based on tracking usage and minimizing wastage.
Better waste management, using sensors to measure how full waste bins are and issuing alerts when it’s time to empty them.
Staying ahead of the smart home curve
With so much happening so fast, with no signs of slowing down, staying up-to-date with home automation tech can feel like an impossible task.
However, there’s a lot you can do to ensure you stay ahead of the curve and access these incredible benefits as they roll onto the market. Let’s check out a few ideas.
Keep your network current
Your home automation devices are only as good as the network they run on. That means a robust and up-to-date home network is one of the best investments you can make in your smart home.
Consider upgrading to a Wi-Fi 6 router, or the even more advanced 6E router. This will open up new possibilities when it comes to 5G and bring a new level of speed and slickness to your IoT network.
Another option is to set up a mesh network — a collection of connectivity sources around your home instead of a single router — to provide better coverage.
Keep your devices maintained
With the rate at which home automation technology is advancing, devices that were brand new just a few years ago are quickly becoming outdated.
This is especially true for firmware — it’s essential to keep your devices updated at all times to ensure they’re optimally secure and can take advantage of new features and capabilities.
Remember that your devices won’t last forever, and have some kind of plan in place to review and replace any older technology.
Stay informed
One of the best ways to keep pace with the rapidly changing world of home automation is to join online communities and attend events.
Of course, it’s not always feasible to travel huge distances to attend conferences and expos just to learn more about your smart home devices, but you can learn a lot from joining the right forums and online groups. These can help you get quick answers to questions, gain inspiration for future projects, and stay up to date with all the latest news and advice.
Here are some ideas:
r/HomeAutomation on Reddit, a subreddit dedicated to home automation with tips, questions, and shared projects.
Arduino’s community and forum: a place for Arduino users to gather and talk about their own projects, share guides, and discuss challenges they have encountered.
There’s also an extensive list of Facebook groups, YouTube channels, and blogs to explore, and specific technologies and devices often have their own dedicated support groups and online spaces.
Get into DIY
What better way to access the next generation of home automation technology than to build it yourself?
Today it’s easier than ever for total amateurs to build their own IoT devices and home automation projects, with nothing more than some simple components and a bit of basic coding knowledge.
At Arduino, we help people get started with their own home automation journey. Our products are built to help everyone from complete beginners to advanced makers create their own smart home technology and share it with the world.
Contact us to learn more about this and how to get started.
3D printing, the stuff of science fiction only a few short years ago, is becoming more widely available all the time. Buying your own 3D printer to keep in your home is now fairly accessible, with entry-level printers available for just a few hundred dollars.
But why would you buy one? It’s easy to think 3D printers are still a niche toy, exciting for a few enthusiasts but largely useless for the general population. But this couldn’t be more wrong — 3D printers have a wide range of very practical uses for everyday households.
In this article, we’ll take a look at why 3D printing is so useful and some of the many reasons to consider adding a 3D printer to your own smart home.
Why 3D printing is so useful
It’s fast and convenient. With a 3D printer, you can produce simple objects, creations, and components for existing items in a fairly short amount of time — much quicker than ordering the same things online or heading to a local store.
You get a ton of control over what you print. Need a very specific shaped object to repair a broken item in your home? It may be impossible to buy what you need anywhere, but a 3D printer allows you to create exactly the right size and shape you need.
It’s relatively affordable. As mentioned, basic 3D printers can be had for fairly cheap nowadays, and printing — for smaller objects, at least — costs very little.
It’s sustainable. It’s much more sustainable to print your own things than order them across large distances, and this is especially true for niche items that might need to be shipped across the globe to reach you.
Using 3D printing in your smart home
So what can you use a 3D printer for? There are many potential uses for a 3D printer in your smart home, and they range from practical tasks like repairing broken furniture to more creative hobbies. Let’s take a look at some of the main reasons to own a 3D printer.
Create useful items for your home
3D printers are perfect for creating small, useful items to use around the home. Some examples are coasters, decorations, lampshades, stationery, and small kitchen tools. This is a great way to combine practical use with a fun creative hobby, putting your own personal spin on the little items you use every day.
Repair items
You know that table you have that just never sits right? The door handle that doesn’t quite match the others in the house? The light switch that doesn’t fit exactly flush with the wall?
3D printing is the perfect solution to many of these small defects and faults. Because you have so much control over what you print — 3D printers can print according to virtually any instructions — it’s easy to create components to fix and spruce up the objects and appliances around your smart home.
Education
3D printers aren’t a regular fixture in classrooms around the world just yet, but it’s only a matter of time. These machines allow students to take a more hands-on and creative approach to their learning. Some examples could be:
Science projects like creating models of the solar system of the structure of an atom
Geography work like printing detailed models of mountains or volcanoes
All kinds of product design work
Creative work like art
Arts and creative projects
Creative projects aren’t just for the classroom — many people own 3D printers purely for their own artistic work. There’s almost no limit to what a 3D printer can do in this area, and with a little experience, it’s possible to create truly beautiful and incredibly detailed works of art at home.
Build your own smart home with Arduino
3D printing is just one aspect of a smart home. There’s an almost endless list of things you can do with the right home automation tools — from growing a smart garden to keeping your pets entertained and fed.
Everybody loves a good BBQ. Getting your family and friends together on a long summer day and evening, cooking delicious food and having a great time as smoke drifts through the air — it’s the perfect weekend activity.
BBQs can also be stressful, however. Anyone who has ever tried to host one will know the challenges of managing multiple meats at once, trying to avoid any overcooking (or undercooking) disasters, and keeping track of all that equipment.
Automation can help run your BBQ much more smoothly, minimizing any mishaps and making sure everyone has the best experience possible. In this article, we’ll look at how home automation can improve the BBQ experience and share some examples from Arduino’s Project Hub.
How home automation improves BBQs
Keep track of different items. Automation makes it easier to manage multiple meats and other food items at the same time, notifying you when something is ready so you don’t get overwhelmed by tasks and neglect any of your cooking.
Stay on top of temperature by measuring each piece of food and ensuring it’s at the perfect point.
Create a more welcoming outdoor area with things like automated lighting, heaters, and even a smart garden.
Easy cleanup with robots and other tools to leave your grill and other tools sparkling clean.
Arduino community member Duncan Barbee knew that the most flavorful way to grill is to use charcoal to heat your smokers. While propane and electric smokers give you better temperature control, they lose that unique and delicious charcoal flavor.
But charcoal heaters present many challenges. You need to constantly stay on top of the temperature, adjusting the vents on a regular basis to make sure everything is just right as the charcoal level changes in the smoker.
Barbee wanted to build a project that gave him the best of both worlds — the tasty charcoal flavor with the ease and convenience of an electric or propane smoker. He developed a controller that monitors the temperature in the smoker and automatically adjusts the airflow to the charcoal to maintain the correct temperature at all times, allowing him to sit back and relax as the perfect charcoal-based BBQ unfolds.
Robert Korn had already created a sous vide controller using Arduino and a handful of other components, with great success. He chose to apply the same model to a smoker and devised the Smokerduino, which ensures perfectly cooked meat every time with minimal effort from the chef.
Roger Theriault and his wife enjoy making cheese and yogurt at home, but this is a long process involving a thermometer and lots of waiting around. To cut some steps out, he built his own smart thermometer to monitor the temperature of the food and beep when a specific temperature was reached and it was time for the next step.
However, when the device stopped working, Theriault decided to upgrade it instead of simply fixing it. The new iteration of the thermometer uses Alexa devices too, enabling him to easily monitor and control everything cooking in the kitchen or outside in the smoker.
The way it works is fairly straightforward — just give Alexa an instruction and it will find the recipe and instruct the given device to start from step one of that recipe. It also draws on the data from the recipe to monitor the temperature and make any notifications or adjustments needed.
Better BBQs with Arduino
Monitoring and controlling cooking is one of the most useful and rewarding use cases for home automation. Arduino’s products make it possible to assemble detailed and advanced projects to take your BBQs to the next level.
Check out the project hub for some more inspiration or visit the home page to learn more about how Arduino works.
Being able to design your own custom smart home device is a great way to both have fun experimenting with various hardware/software and to escape the walled IoT device ecosystems that so many users find themselves trapped within. One maker who goes by mrdesha came up with a smart heater solution that utilizes the new Arduino Oplà IoT Kit to provide voice functionality to their room heater.
In terms of hardware, mrdesha’s project is quite simple as it just needs a few parts to function. The main component is the MKR IoT Carrier board from the Oplà Kit, along with the MKR WiFi 1010 that fits into it. Because the Oplà has two relays onboard, a pair of buttons on the heater’s remote were connected to the common (COM) and normally closed (NC) terminals, allowing for a single GPIO pin to digitally “press” each button.
Over in the Arduino Cloud, three variables were created that control various aspects of the heater, including on/off, set high-power mode, and set low-power mode. These variables are also all compatible with the Alexa integration, meaning that a user can simply tell their smart home speaker to adjust the heater automatically.
The central controller runs on a Raspberry Pi which is running Mozilla’s new smart home operating system. Each individual device is Arduino based, and when you click through on the site you get a well designed graphic explaining how to build each device. The devices them
It’s also fun to see how many people worked together on this project and added their own touch. Whether it’s a unique covering for the devices or a toggle switch that can toggle itself there’s quite a few personal touches.
As anyone who’s had the sneaking suspicion that Jeff Bezos was listening in to their conversations, we get the need for this. We also love how approachable it makes hacking your own hardware. What are your thoughts?
Is it too much to ask for a home to have a little ‘smart’ built-in? If you’ve ever woken up (or come home) to your dwelling being flooded, you’ll know how terrible it feels, how long it can take to recover from, and how stressful it can be. Yeah, it’s happened to us before, so we really feel for [David Schneider]. He woke up one Sunday morning to a whole lot of water in his house. The inlet valve for his washing machine somehow got stuck in the open position after putting a load of laundry in the previous night.
[David] took progressively complex measures to prevent a broken water feed flood from happening in the future. First, he lined the entire floor of his laundry closet with a steel tray. OK, that’s a good start but won’t prevent another disaster unless it is caught very quickly. How about a simple audible water alarm? That’s good and all if you’re home, but what if you’re not?
Next, he installed a valve with a mechanical timer on the water line for the washing machine which closes automatically after 2 hours of being opened. Much better, but what about all the other thirsty appliances around the house? After searching online a little, he found plenty of whole house systems that would work for him, but there were 2 problems with these. First, most were network-based and he didn’t want to IoT-ify his house’s water system. Second, they were overpriced.
Of course the solution was to put together his own system! First, he purchased a few mostly inexpensive things — a wireless alarm, some water sensors, and a motorized ball valve. Then he collected the last few things he needed from what he had on hand around the house, and got to work connecting the 4 LEDs on the alarm to 4 analog input pins on his Arduino. Next, he added a relay between the Arduino and the motorized ball valve.
If a sensor detects water, it tells the alarm about it (wirelessly), which triggers the Arduino to energize a relay that is connected to the motorized ball valve, causing it to shut off the main water line for the entire house. Disaster averted! Sure, it’s a fairly simple hack, but it works, meets his requirements, and now he sleeps better at night knowing he won’t wake up (or come home) to an indoor swimming pool.
It’s surprising that we haven’t seen more hacks like this given it’s such a common problem. The closest thing we can remember is an overflow sensor for an aquarium. If homes came standard with a water main shutoff system, it would remove a stressful event from our lives and maybe even lower our insurance premium.
Git Commit is an interactive installation and exhibition about smart homes, and user response to pervasive technologies entering our private spaces. The installation aims to further the research that Casa Jasmina, powered by Arduino and Genuino, is carrying out regarding social home environment from an open design and user centered perspective.
In order to deeply understand the impact of IoT in the house for the possible stakeholders, an interactive system of four mini-printers will be set up at Palazzo Clerici, a 17th century building located in the heart of the city of Milan, and firstly belonged to one of the oldest and most powerful Milanese families, the Visconti dei Consignori di Somma.
Each printer will be connected to Casa Jasmina GitHub repository where users will be able to respond to questions and spark new avenues to the project.
The feedback gained will inform new types of interactions and approaches to the future smart home, that will reflow in the Casa Jasmina design process.
Come and visit us and give us your input too! Check this page and explore the topics.
Planet Arduino is, or at the moment is wishing to become, an aggregation of public weblogs from around the world written by people who develop, play, think on Arduino platform and his son. The opinions expressed in those weblogs and hence this aggregation are those of the original authors. Entries on this page are owned by their authors. We do not edit, endorse or vouch for the contents of individual posts. For more information about Arduino please visit www.arduino.cc
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