Just curious if anybody here is currently attending CES? I'm attending for work so the first couple days have been all business, but was going to hit the home automation stuff tomorrow...quite a few "smart device" companies exhibiting...maybe 15+ that I recognized.
Anybody know where? They aren't listed in the exhibitor list but would not be surprised if they are in attendance. I'll look around tomorrow in sands A-D which is where most of the smart home stuff is.
Might be a good place to start...
Link:
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Ah, nice. I already had smartest\zooz on my list. Some others that are in the same area I was going to hit: Aeotec, Z-wave Alliance, Silicon Labs, Schlage, NodOn, Legrand, Leviton, Jasco, Withings, Ring (and the other major cloud folks). I'll try to extract a few tidbits where possible 
I already hit up the other major microcontroller players that have zigbee development paths.
Might have to track down Honeywell and see if I can social engineer my way to local access lol
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If you end up seeing some nice smart lock for the EU market let me know.
Also if you find wayze. Try to gasp if facial recognition is coming soon.
Thought I would report back on what I saw. Overall, some cool stuff but nothing ground breaking. I was most interested in the zigbee\w-wave microcontroller pipeline (might be biased since I'm a firmware guy). I guess TI is still the zigbee king with silabs running the z-wave show. Just more integration, better specs, and improvements in the underlying standards (protocol stacks).
I will say the Home Automation category was MUCH larger than last year and booths seemed very busy. The sheer number of z-wave\zigbee devices is pretty enormous given we tend to only use a few ol' reliables. As I looked, I wondered how many we may be missing out on since we tend to choose something with a driver or that has a predicate driver (or just outright has a better feature).
One theme is that everyone wants to be the next Ring\nest\blah. So new things are going to be more and more cloud based. I had a few deep conversations with the reps on why I think that is great, but keeping a localized pathway would make their product a winner. Unfortunately these are sales\marketting guys so....
Some of these may be out in the wild, but they were new to me:
- SmartHouse (Zooz) was running their samples off of hubitat. They were showing some of their more recent releases. Also a motion based dimmer similar to the GE\Jasco.
- Ecolink who is a HW design house was looking for companies to use\brand their long list of devices with various radios. They had next generation models of pretty much all the common sensor types.
- Ecolink was also showing off their first Thermostats. These are zigbee or z-wave. I liked the traditional look, local capability, and it seemed on paper to have the standalone function that others (family\friends\guests) would know how to use.
- Honeywell debuted T9/T10 wifi smart thermostat. They have a sensor network and claim to help manage based on room occupancy and zones that are colder\warmer. They will have the standard Alexa, Google, Homekit in due time.
- Sensative has the next generation strips in design. Claims double the battery life and a 8 year guarantee even if you ping the crap out of them.
- I liked the kwikset lineup of locks over the others I saw. The quality just seemed high (at least compared to my Schlages. Of course their flagship was a new cloud based solution.
Honestly, other than that it's just the incremental "filling the bag" that you would expect.
The other trend you see is lots of startup-centrics going with their own full scale automation solutions....smart bathrooms, etc.
Tons of pacific rim companies with LOTS of sensors. Quality unknown of course, but there are LOTS of choices we tend not try out.
I think there is a large void where a hardware\firmware company could build up a solid sensor ecosystem covering the full gamut from contact switch to door lock with a mission similar to hubitat...LOCAL. Having a portfolio of all device types in zigbee, z-wave, or local wifi (maybe with swappable pre-certified modules) would seem like a home run and minimize upstart cost.
Anyway cool stuff as always.
Didn't see Waze @Somel, but there were a lot of nice lock manufacturers (some I had not heard of) that had EU offerings. Kind of depends on the style you are looking for.
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Did you see keyWe?
Funny you ask. I had a short time to run through the startup dungeon (ground floor where they put all the startup-esque) exhibitors. So I didn't. But I have a window of time and I may run the home automation section again and check them out.
It's interesting because the dungeon is PACKED versus the upstairs more established smart home players. I'll definately check it out.
@doug Anything of interest you want to know that I could chat with them about?
Ya, when are they shipping and why aren't they updating their marketing now that their original dates (July 18) have blasted by.
Thanks
Keywe told me in 2 months via Amazon.
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I'll swing down tomorrow and quiz them
Typical kickstarter. Threre are a ton of indigogo and kickstarter (and other varieties) down there.
Basically, as @patrick said. Amazon within weeks is what they said. I chatted with them for awhile...mustering my best social engineering skills to find out the delay reason as best as possible.
Asked them how the process went and what their major struggles were to get some insight into the delays. The delays have mostly been surrounding needing to support more radio frequencies to cover their backers and for market launch and that wasn't so smooth. That's essentially what I was told. That made me think....wonder if these have been properly FCC certified (and the other similar country agencies). The model I played with had no FCC marking although it seems pretty common for kickstarters to skip certs when they get in a pinch despite the huge potential for fines.
Otherwise, looked pretty neat. I had not heard of it before. They were setup in an area without a lot of traffic but then again, it's the last day.
