Increase in consumers purchasing DIY- style connected homes

Silicon Labs announced a reference design that accelerates development timelines by streamlining the product development process for ZigBee®-based home automation, connected lighting, and smart gateways.

Silicon Labs’ IoT solution , the first product in the turnkey series, includes hardware, firmware, and software tools necessary for developers to create a variety of functionally connected home products with interoperability and scalability, based on Silicon Labs’ ZigBee “Golden Unit” home automation (HA 1.2) software stack and ZigBee system-on-chip (SoC) mesh networking technology.

Silicon Labs has designed a cost-effective reference design that reduces complexity by connecting Zigbee devices, such as lighting, dimmer switches, and door/window contact sensors, to connected home networks. This simple design means that consumers who regularly purchase “DIY” connected home products from U.S. home building materials and interior retailers like Home Depot and Lowes can use it very easily.

Silicon Labs' Zigbee connected lighting reference design provides not only a wireless lighting board but also a plug-in demo board suitable for rapid demonstration and testing. Through the Golden Unit Zigbee stack, LED lights can reliably connect, interoperate, and disconnect from mesh networks, as well as possess scalability allowing anywhere from a few to hundreds of light nodes to be connected to the same network. Connected lights support dimming, as well as white, color temperature, and RGB color adjustment.

Silicon Labs' Zigbee-based home automation reference design includes a capacitive touch dimmable light switch and small form factor door and window contact sensors. The light switch provides color, tone adjustment, and dimming control functions, which conventional switches cannot perform. Unlike conventional switches, these wireless, battery-powered switches can be easily installed anywhere in the home without moving components.



User gesture detection implemented using Silicon Labs' EFM8 capacitive sensing MCU

The switch design was implemented using Silicon Labs' EFM8 capacitive sensing MCU, which can detect different user gestures (touch, hold, swipe). The contact sensor reference design provides all the tools necessary to implement a wireless, battery-powered sensor that monitors the status (open or closed) of doors and windows, which is useful for automatically controlling lighting.

Silicon Labs provides developers with two Zigbee gateway options to complete a reference design. The first is a plug-and-play USB virtual gateway that runs on all PC development platforms in Windows, OS X, and Linux environments, and the second option is a 'ready-to-use' Wi-Fi and Ethernet gateway reference design based on an embedded Linux computer system.

With two gateway options, developers can control and monitor Zigbee HA 1.2 compliant end nodes via Wi-Fi from devices running a web browser, such as smartphones or tablets. Using an intuitive web-based user interface, developers can easily set up rules between Zigbee devices, including lights, dimmer light switches, and contact sensors.