Can I control smart appliances with my iPhone?

With the official release of Apple's iOS10 system, HomeKit (Apple Smart Home Platform) officially appeared on the desktop of our iPhone, this icon is "family". But this feature is little known, or it is dusty when you see such a thing open. So what does the “family” function do, and what technologies are used in it?

What is HomeKit doing?

The concept behind HomeKit is this, https://baike.so.com/doc/605914-641910.html" "_blank Apple provides consumers with a https://baike.so.com/doc/5336466-5571905 .html" "_blankiOS devices, and control the user's home products through an application or through a common UI interface of their partner application.

Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, said users can even focus on different applications and then use a single command to control them.

For example, if you are leaving home, just tell Siri that you are gone, then this command can perform multiple operations, including turning off the indoor lights and locking the door.

Oh, the original "family" is to do home appliance control, so tall, why can't your iPhone control? Is your iPhone buying a loss?

Since Apple introduced HomeKit, in view of Apple's huge user base, it has been starting to develop home appliances that are compatible with HomeKit. However, the first person to eat crabs always has a price. The price of these appliances is not too expensive or cannot be bought in China. Therefore, the use of HomeKit is still a small group, which has led to a large number of people who simply do not know this. What to use.

What technologies are needed to implement HomeKit to control home appliances?

Before we introduce the required technical points, we need to understand the workflow of HomeKit. First, you need your iPhone to control home appliances through the "home" app or Siri voice recognition. The APP can be controlled within the LAN, but voice recognition requires the iPhone to connect to the Internet. Siri recognizes that the voice data will be uploaded to the cloud, and will be identified and processed and sent to the iPhone. At this point, the iPhone will send commands to the gateway via WiFi. After receiving the gateway, the gateway processes the content of the information and controls the appliance. As shown below:

Before answering this question, we can first understand the technology of DIY on GitHub. Internet search, you will find almost all Raspberry Pi as a gateway, Arduino to do the wired control part. The software part mainly lies in the gateway, based on homebridge to do the HomeKit transceiver protocol interface, homeassistant to do smart home control interface, homebridge-homeassistant to do plug-in.

Then the question is coming, can you DIY yourself? of course can. But what about products? Certainly not.

Reasons: 1 It is well known that the production of products that match Apple will undergo a very rigorous review. First, an MFI certification code is required. Second, Apple will strictly audit the factory during production. The homebridge is an SDK that "can't get on the table". The author, KhaosTKhaosT, is a Chinese student studying in the United States. He once worked as an intern at Apple's HomeKit team. This is also a sense of why he was the first to reverse Apple's HomeKit protocol. Later, Apple asked to delete this part of the blog, but the code has been widely circulated on github. Do you think Apple will let you sell the product? 2 The Raspberry Pi board that is circulated on the Internet is a commercial-grade product that does not meet the requirements of industrial grade. We will strive for stability in our products.

Based on the above three points, the proposal still needs to get the MFI code honestly, buy the genuine HomeKit SDK, accept the audit factory, what can be done is to try to stabilize the product. Therefore, to make a product, you need to overcome the following technical difficulties.

First, you need a genuine HomeKit SDK. This is essential and essential;

Second, you need a stable running gateway;

You also need a stable wireless or wired connection solution.

So where can I buy the genuine HomeKit SDK? NXP, quoted at $499, contains unlimited production licenses and two hours of professional support. It supports not only WiFi and Ethernet, but also BLE4.2. Only TCP/IP is required and no other dependencies are required.

After solving the SDK, it is necessary to find a stable gateway solution and a wireless transmission scheme. The recommendation here is Zhou Ligong's gateway solution: A6G2C series IoT core board, based on NXP i.MX6UL series Cortex-A7 high-performance processor design, integrated industrial-grade Wi-Fi, Bluetooth wireless communication unit. Ideal for rapid development of smart home gateway products.

The AW516x, Nano-type zigbee wireless module measures only 13.5mm x 16.5mm and has a sleep power consumption as low as 100nA. It not only supports off-the-shelf free Fastzigbee networking protocols, but also supports users' secondary development based on the standard zigbee protocol stack, including the ZigBee 3.0 protocol.