SIMO.io Smart Home Network Architecture

SIMO.io introduces a game-changing professional smart home system architecture that is reliable, extremely comprehensive, yet super simple!

Reliability

There have been many smart home systems created over the past few decades; however, not all of them are created equally. Countless amounts of money have been spent on marketing smart home systems and smart home devices.

The market is hot; everybody wants it, and companies started offering various cheap and quick solutions for those who want it quick and cheap! However, there is nothing worse than a smart home system that starts falling apart on a homeowner after a few years of operation. Usually, it happens by surprise and creates an enormous amount of stress for the homeowner, which might lead to weeks spent in a hotel while trying to fix your smart home’s issues.

SIMO.io was designed as an answer to all of that. We believe that the time has come to turn every house into a smart one, but to do it on a large scale, the system must be as reliable as your electricity or water supply. Therefore, all of the system components are designed with reliability and security in mind as the number one priority.

Comprehensiveness

There are many systems and devices in the market which specialize in certain areas of a smart home. We do not see those systems as "smart home" systems as they serve only a single purpose, for example, only climate control, alarm, watering, gate control, etc. Those are simply smart devices. The problem with them is that they are usually not compatible with anything else except for themselves. There are other systems that try to be more diverse; however, manufacturers often seek to create a system that is completely closed. In a closed system, a client is forced to purchase various smart devices from that specific system alone. We think that closed-type systems business is highly unfair.

The SIMO.io system was designed in a way that offers maximum comprehensiveness and future-proof compatibility with all regular home electrical appliances and smart devices. In addition to that, we employ open-source software, which allows for maximum software flexibility, custom scripting and automation and rapid development of new features.

Autonomous Central Computer

Any professional smart home system starts with a central computer that is responsible for managing automation tasks and allowing users to control all the aspects of the smart home property via a mobile app. This central computer must operate from within the property on which the smart home system is running. The central computer must be 100% autonomous and must not need an internet connection to operate, while all of the control of it must be available from within the local area network.

This is exactly how the SIMO.io central computer operates. It ensures that your smart home system is always running independently of what's happening in the rest of the world. Our main system computer is running the world's most reliable operating system - Linux Ubuntu, while the entire codebase of the system is open source and available for everyone to investigate, offer fixes, or improvements. This guarantees maximum system stability and security.

If you are looking to buy any kind of smart home system, always start with its main computer! If the system doesn't have one, or can't operate without an internet connection, it means you are dealing with some sort of cloud-based solution, which has an enormous amount of issues associated with it. If the property loses internet connection, the smart home system will not work or will malfunction. However, that's not the worst-case scenario. The absolute nightmare is the fact that if your smart home system is dependent on a cloud service, the operations of "clouds" change constantly and there is a 100% chance that in the upcoming 10 years that cloud will change its means of operation or discontinue its support for your system devices altogether. There is nothing worse than a smart home property, which becomes non-functional after some years of operation, which almost always reveals itself as a surprise. All of that might lead to the need to rewire your entire home, while you spend weeks and months in a hotel. Not fun at all. Avoid cloud-based smart home systems at all costs!

There are also many systems that are closed source. Closed source means nobody, except company owners, knows what happens inside that computer, which also means that it eventually might stop working without any precautions, while open source means 100% transparency. Read more about open source here: <<<link to article about open source>>>

The SIMO.io central hub must be employed at the property and hooked up directly to the LAN router, which allows it to communicate with other devices on that network. Since it's open source, many smart devices can already be controlled by using custom open-source integrations, that one can look up online or contribute in making them.

The Game Changer: Colonel Boards

The Game Changer Colonel Boards are the very essence of the SIMO.io smart home system. These boards serve as local logic centers of the system, collecting data from nearby sensors, controlling relays and dimmers, and providing digital interfaces for DALI lighting, I2C devices, and more. They are mounted on a standard DIN rail, providing 38 IO ports and two digital interfaces.

A PoE network switch is necessary to connect and power these boards. Once that is in place, LAN cables are routed to the places where these logical centers appears to be most convenient.

Wired System

As you can see, the entire system is purely wire-based. In addition to that, it uses regular IP standards which provide maximum communication speed and connection reliability. No other wire-based system, like KNX or others, can even try to compare to IP-based networks. These networks run all over the globe and ensure lightning-speed communications for entire humanity! It’s already a time-proven technology that the whole world depends on.

There are systems out there that offer using wireless smart home devices; we think it's a terrible, dirty, cheap, non-professional, even shameful way of doing smart home. If you want to know the arguments read: <<<"Wireless smart home devices are shameful". >>>

Hooking Up Common Devices

Most of the things we want to hook up to a smart home system are simple. Those include lights, light switches, blinds, gates, electrical valves, motion sensors, window/door sensors, flood sensors, sirens, bells, temperature sensors, air quality sensors, and other electrically operated devices that we can turn on/off or control by shorting specially designed terminals.

A single SIMO.io Game Changer Colonel Board set can compactly accommodate more than 40 devices of this sort, which is usually more than enough if one uses common sense while deciding on the locations of these boards in a property.

IO Ports & Modules

A single SIMO.io Game Changer Colonel Board provides 38 IO ports, which can be used to accommodate binary sensors (buttons, motion sensors, window sensors, flood sensors, etc.), relays, LED dimmers, and AC dimmers.

1 - 2 ports can be used as digital interfaces, which allow for I2C interface or DALI interface. More interface types are coming in the near future.

Since we are doing smart home, this design is really smart! Every module is optically isolated from The Game Changer board, therefore if you get into any kind of electrical issues with your devices, the worst-case scenario is that the IO module will release magic smoke and stop working, as we have also included single-time-use fuses in them. Much different from all other systems, our modules are not that expensive to replace and they do not require any pairing/configuration once that is required.

In case you manage to smoke out The Game Changer board, remove all the devices from the ports, hook a new board in place and put these devices back to the original ports. Then there is an easy way of replacing the old board with the new one by simply using our mobile app.

Power Outages

Since the smart home system has control over the majority of the electrical wiring in the property, it must be resistant to power outages. Most systems are not immune to it, which creates a million issues that homeowners become aware of only when hit by it. Systems that are not immune to it in one way or another are not professional.

Remember we have hooked up our Game Changer Colonel Boards to the network using a PoE switch? This automatically created an opportunity for yet another sophisticated, yet super simple, upgrade of the system. We can now protect our entire smart home system from power outages by using any regular UPS device! These UPS devices are specifically designed to protect computers and electronics. They are cheap as chips and they run the world! So simply grab one from any electronics store and hook your internet router, SIMO.io hub, and PoE switch that feeds Game Changer boards onto it.

Conclusion

By employing time-proven technologies, transparency and smart design we have created the smart home system that is cost-efficient, easy to understand, simple to install, offers maximum possible reliability and comprehensiveness.

If you are looking to build a decent smart home system for yourself or in need of a reliable smart home solution that you would install for your clients as a professional electrician, you have come to the right place! SIMO.io is designed exactly for you. Continue reading this wiki to get more familiar with our system nuances and capabilities.