Welcome to Piha

Welcome to your equipped smart home!

Kevin and myself are home automation ethusiasts 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 still requires some technical know how 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 predicatable and seamless ways. (They’re not perfect because we keep experimenting and taking on new techologies, 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 is simple to setup and operate – we’ve taken all our learnings and skills and developed a turnkey solution where setting up is literally plugging the main unit into power and putting your preconfigured sensors, bulbs and power switches where you need them. We’ll provide same basic automations but we’ll also work with you to create automations that work for your home and your family.

Welcome to PiHA

Should you decide to help us with our initial testing, we’ll ship you a unit we are calling ‘PiHA’, which contains the main home automation controller, a high precison sensor, two color capable LED smart bulbs 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.

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 auotmation and is supported by a vast number of developers – all keen to get home automation working perfectly. It works with hundreds of products from all sorts 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 interfer 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 it can’t be hacked – another major concern for home automation products.

What is Home Assistant?

HA 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. 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 whats happening in your home. You can view power consumption graphs, play with lighting and check the state of sensors.

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 pacakage).

What else can it do?

The possibilites are endless and we encourage you to talk to us about things in your home you’d like to automate. An automation is simply a way to combine sensor input to drive smart devices so the more auotmation you desire, the more sensors you are going to need.

Do you want to know how much power your washing machine is using? Do you want to know when your washing machine has finished? You can use the smart power switch to monitor power consumption and PiHA will run automations to let you know when the washing machine is done.

Interested in mood lighting or night lights? Smart LED bulbs give you a full spectrun of colors and intensities from blue to green to red to cold white or warm white – all in one bulb. The Home Assistant web interface ……??

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
4. Your package will come with setup instructions and gudiance on sensor placement. (the information is also available on our web site)

Terms of Agreement

• Sign onto Mattermost for communtication
• Allow us remote access to PiHA
• Allow us to pull diagnostics and performance data (we might want to detail the extact data we are pulling). We will extract the following types of data.
  • Logs (containing system operations, warnings and error conditions.
• 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 acustomed 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 auotmations wil 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 work load.