2020–02: Brooklyn IoT Technology Meetup Group
By: Paul Yao
Tags: Smart Home Automation, IoT, Smart Home, Meetup

The second meeting of the Brooklyn IoT Technology Meetup Group was held online on April 15, 2020

The second meeting of the Brooklyn IoT Technology Meetup Group was held on April 15, 2020. We met online, owing to the PAUSE that New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo put in place. The speaker, Chris Muench, is CEO at C-Labs. He has been working on his smart home for more than a decade, and has over 160 smart home devices in his house. (There are countless other devices that he acquired, tried to use, and then rejected for one of several reasons that he described during the course of his talk.)

Before getting into the details of the talk, I want to extend a word of thanks to our sponsors, Barrows Intense Tasting Room and C-Labs Corporation. We had a drawing at the end of the meeting for a gift certificate for Barrows Intense Tasting Room. The winner was Ian T — congratulations, Ian!

The topic for the meeting was: Smart Home — What is it like living in a smart home? Chris’s day job is creating smart factories. When he goes home at the end of the day, he works on creating a smart home. You can tell he loves what he does as he spends nights and days (and weekends too!) helping create the digitized world of tomorrow.

Chris defines a smart home is one where the right things happen automatically. Consider a light in a hallway. When you walk into thehallway, lights should go on automatically. When noone is in the hallway, the lights should be turned off automatically. In addition to being automatic, these actions should happen reliably. What this means, in practical terms, is that they should not rely on a cloud connection because cloud connections are not 100% reliable. (They should also not rely on humans to make things happen because humans are also not 100% reliable.)

Consider a simple thing: a light bulb. Should you use “smart lightbulbs”? They seem like a good idea. The idea is straightforward: allow a light bulb to be remotely connected so you can turn it on or turn it off remotely (say, from your phone). Along the way, maybe allow that light bulb to collect usage data as well, so you can see how much you are spending on electricity on a per-bulb basis! What could go wrong?

What can go wrong is the light switch. People are used to using a light switch to turn lights on and off. When you have a “smart lightbulb”, you need to keep the light switch turned “on” all the time, otherwise it won’t work. But people being people, someone almost always flips the lightswitch to the “off” position. As a result, the lightbulb (which now has now power) cannot be turned on from a phone.

Chris addressed the question of where the locus of control should be for devices in a smart home. Many available smart home devices rely on having a cloud connection. The idea seems attractive at first: A cloud connection means you can <insert action> your <insert device> from anywhere in the world. There are certainly scenarios where this makes sense, such as when you want to view a security camera’s footage when you are not at home. There are several problems these types of cloud-connected devices:

The cloud connection becomes the single point of failure.

When a cloud connection is required, it prevents a user from controlling which devices are cloud-connected and which are not.

A required cloud connection means that any security failure on the part of the device vendor may also introduce vulnerabilities in your smart home.

If a device vendor goes out of business, the vendor’s cloud service is likely to be discontinued and all of its devices that require cloud connections will no longer work.

Here’s an example: a garage door opener that relies on a cloud connection. Perhaps the cloud is available most of the time, and most of the time the garage door can be opened and closed. This model breaks down when the internet is not available, and the garage cannot be opened or closed. When cloud connections are overwhelmed, perhaps because of a denial-of-service (DOS) attack, your ability to control your garage door (aside from manually operating it) disappears.

Chris suggested that smart home devices should be controlled locally, meaning in the home itself. For many devices, the case can be made to use cloud connectivity to enable remote control of smart home devices. But when and how that occurs should be left up to the owner of the device, which is something that is not possible with many of today’s cloud-centric smart home devices.

View into a greenhouse showing Chris’s FarmBot

Chris gave a demo of a pretty unique device that he has at his home, his farmbot from FarmBot. As the name suggests, this is a farming robot. Created by Rory Aronson in 2011, while he was a student at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, California, the farmbot makes growing food as easy as playing the online game Farmville.

Screen shot with Chris Muench showing the FarmBot software for organizing a garden.

Here are some of the recommendations that Chris made during the presentation: