Welcome to your Equipped Smart Home

Kevin and Richard are home automation enthusiasts, and we’ve decided to take the advice of many folks and “do what you love” – and we love home automation.

Although home automation is a growing industry, it does require some technical knowhow and patience to pull all the pieces together but we’re here to change that.

We’ve come to recognize that home automation is complex. It is scattered and haphazard with hundreds of different smart things that should work together but often don’t. It is ripe with failure conditions that lead to frustration and that is hampering its acceptance – believe us, we’ve lived it for years now. We understand these failures and we’ve worked around them, investigated different technologies, different brands, different approaches and now we both have automated homes that behave in predictable and seamless ways. (They’re not perfect because we keep experimenting and taking on new technologies, but that’s how we keep up with this fast moving technology).

Bringing home automation to every home is a real challenge but it’s a challenge we’ve decided to take on. To that end, Kevin and I are trying to spin up a business that provides a solution that is super simple to setup and operate – we’ve taken all our learnings and skills and developed a turnkey solution. Setting up PiHA is literally plugging the main unit into power and putting your pre-configured sensors, bulbs and power switches where you need them. We’ll provide same basic automation, but we’ll also work with you to create automations that work for your home and your family.

Getting to our goal requires a lot of validating ideas and system designs and that’s where we are asking for help. We need to test in real world environments and gather feedback so we can iterate our designs, find the gotchas and ensure the experience our customers desire can be achieved.

Welcome to PiHA

Should you decide to help us with our initial testing, we’ll ship you a unit we are calling ‘PiHA’, which consists of the main home automation controller, a high precision movement sensor, a color capable LED smart bulb and a smart power switch. You’ll need to plug the home automation controller into your home router via an Ethernet cable (provided) – although this is not strictly necessary as PiHA can operate just fine without ever seeing the internet. However, in these early testing stages, we will need access to the system to help fine tune your automations, keep your system running smoothly, help out if things go wrong and gather usage information.

What is PiHA?

If you’re interested in understanding what’s going on in that black box, read on – otherwise you can skip the techno-jargon and find out what it can actually do for you. I would like to help.

PiHA is our first prototype system (it stands for (Raspberry) Pi Home Assistant). A Raspberry Pi, a small but powerful Single Board Computing system runs open-source software known as Home Assistant (HA). HA is fast becoming the gold standard in DIY home automation and is supported by a vast number of developers – all keen to get home automation working perfectly. It works with hundreds of products from dozens of manufacturers.

PiHA uses standard WiFi technologies to create a completely separate WiFi network from your homes normal network. We do this because one of the primary modes of failure in home automations is the customers WiFi environment – over which we have no control. So, we create a private, closed WiFi network and all our devices sit on that network and they never interfere with your normal internet surfing while ensuring the most reliable connectivity for the home automation system. That’s why there are 2 big antennas on PiHA – home automation needs super reliable, whole home coverage.

PiHA is built with security in mind – it can work completely standalone with no connection to the internet – so its much harder to hack – another major concern for home automation products.

What is Home Assistant (HA)?

Home Assistant is at the core of PiHA’s capabilities. HA is an open-source software package that is rapidly growing in popularity. Unlike closed systems such as Apple Homekit, Ikea Tradfri, Samsungs SmartThings and a slew of other proprietary systems, HA is an open environment that works with products from many big and small companies, and it can even connect into those closed systems. HA is constantly updated with new product support and new features. HA presents a web interface, and it is through this interface that you can get a good look at what’s happening in your home. You can view power consumption graphs, play with lighting and check the state of sensors. There’s also an iOS and Android app.

What can PiHA do for me?

The simplest and most common home automation is lighting control. The technology has existed for many years – you see it in offices – you walk in, the lights come on and as long as there’s movement in the room, the lights stay on. When you leave, the light turns off. Of course, this is the base line capability of PiHA, which connects a movement sensor (part of the starter package) that you place in a strategic location, and a smart LED bulb (another component in the starter package).

What else can it do?

The possibilities are endless, and we encourage you to talk to us about things in your home you’d like to automate or monitor. An automation is simply a way to combine sensor inputs (any many other variables, like sunrise/sunset, time and dates, pollen levels, camera events, power consumption, leak detection…) to drive smart devices. The more automation you desire, the more sensors you are going to need.

I’d like to help out, what’s next?

1. Fill in our questionnaire and sign the terms of agreement.
2. Give us your home address and phone number, and we’ll send you a PiHA starter package.
3. Sign up on Mattermost for support (Mattermost is a private chat server to which you will receive an invite). You will use this for support and discussions on automation/ideas.
4. Your package will come with setup instructions and guidance on sensor placement. (the information is also available on our web site).

Terms of Agreement

• Sign onto Mattermost for communication
• Allow us remote access to PiHA
• Allow us to pull diagnostics and performance data. We will extract the following types of data.
  • Logs (containing system operations, warnings and error conditions.
  • System stats (CPU, memory usage)
• Agree to contact us when things go wrong and work with us to solve problems.

Time line

This testing phase will last 3 months after which we kindly ask that you return the PiHA system (controller, bulbs, sensors, power switchs etc).

Can I keep PiHA?

If you’ve grown accustomed to PiHA and would like to keep it, we only ask that you cover material costs for the system. Please be aware that our intended business model is partly based on a support contract approach wherein assisting with problems and adding more automations will be covered under a monthly/yearly support contract. If you chose to keep PiHA then some of the services provided during the PiHA testing period may not be available depending on our workload.

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PiHA alpha testing signup

If you would like to experience some simple home automation and help us test PiHA, please fill in this form and we’ll get back to you. Prototype units are very limited, so it’ll be first in, first served.