At CES 2017 in Las Vegas this week, Sigma Designs, the maker of wireless Z-Wave chips, is introducing an enhancement to the specification dubbed “Z-Wave SmartStart,” which promises to save installers of smart home technology a substantial amount of time and effort when it comes to getting connected systems up and running.
Much in the same way that Amazon can set up one of its Echo or Dot solutions to work in a consumer’s home right out of the box based on previous purchases they’ve made of Alexa-enabled products, Z-Wave SmartStart pre-configures devices to a customer’s network before they even reach their home.
“When the devices for a home are dispatched from a distribution center, barcodes on the boxes of devices are scanned, and this is the starting point for the creation of the home network,” explains Raoul Wijgergangs, vice president Z-Wave for Sigma Designs. “When those devices arrive at somebody’s home and they are powered on by the installer, magically the network already exists for that home and that will dramatically reduce installation time and the mistakes that installers can make when they are creating these smart homes. This allows them to focus on the electrical and mechanical work that needs to be put in place and they don’t need to be networking experts – they don’t need to be Cisco and IP engineers suddenly just because they install a smart thermostat or switch.”
Being that the overwhelming majority of the smart home industry is driven by operators – professional security installers and monitoring companies, telecommunications providers and cable firms – whose success is rooted in addressing the needs of the mass market and those consumers who are interested in technology but want someone else to set it up for them, Wijgergangs says they realized a solution was needed to help streamline the installation process.
“To do it all for them involves a lot of installation – locks, thermostats, routers, etc. – and Z-Wave SmartStart is all geared toward helping these operators get these installations done faster,” he adds. “As soon as (SmartStart) devices are powered up by the installer, they show up at the gateway which says, ‘Ok, here is the whitelisted device I knew was going to be a part of this network.’”
Although the company doesn’t have any firm estimates as to how much time installers could save by leveraging devices with SmartStart, Wijgergangs said they have been told by some firms that they expect the average time for an installation, which is currently in the neighborhood of an hour and a half per job, to possibly be cut in half.
Addressing Cybersecurity Concerns
Just because the installation process for Z-Wave-enabled devices will be much quicker moving forward doesn’t mean that security will be sacrificed, which is a common refrain when it comes to the Internet of Things (IoT) these days. Z-Wave SmartStart incorporates the specification’s new S2 framework, which will be mandatory for all Z-Wave certified products as of April 2nd of this year.
The framework was developed in conjunction with cybersecurity experts to provide Z-Wave devices with new levels of impenetrability. By securing communication both locally for home-based devices and in the hub or gateway for cloud functions, S2 also completely removes the risk of devices being hacked while they are included in the network. By using a QR or pin-code on the device itself, the devices are uniquely authenticated to the network as well.
“S2 is the most secure IoT, smart home solution in the industry. Making the installations easier was absolutely a good thing to do, but we knew it couldn’t be at the expense of security,” Wijgergangs says. “The S2 layer sits underneath the Z-Wave SmartStart layer and the SmartStart layer builds on top of the security that is already provided within Z-Wave.”
Backwards Compatibility
Consumers also need not fear that their new Z-Wave devices won’t work with older ones in their homes as Wijgergangs says they always work to ensure backwards compatibility in the specification.
“The installed devices won’t have the feature set of the new devices, but the new devices will be able to communicate back to the old devices,” he says. “Consumers are concerned that they may have to do away with these older devices or reinstall them, but none of that is needed. You bring in five new devices and they will seamlessly become part of the network but you don’t need to exclude the old ones.”
Wijgergangs expects SmartStart technology to be available in Z-Wave products as early as Q3 of this year.
