Smartphone Direct Control of Smart Switch

Smart home system will become more and more widely adopted, because a smart home system makes your life easier, makes your home more comfortable, saves you energy, and gives you more security and a peace of mind. However, people may usually run into problems such as the need to control existing home appliances which are not network control compatible but still have many years of lifetime, and the difficulties to change the existing electrical wiring installation. In order to address these problems, we strive to help our customers to have smooth transition. We have developed many smart switch products by upgrading our traditional electronic wall switches with an integrated network control module.

Our dedicated teams have extensive experience and expertise in developing application software. Although the user interfaces can have many different varieties, the ways to control home appliance, lights and fans with smart switch can be defined as either Smartphone Direct Control or Central Hub Control. The most striking difference between these two ways of controls is as follows:

Smartphone Direct Control: Manual control for individual home appliance, light, or fan only; and

Central Hub Control: Automatic control for one or more appliances, lights or fans. It usually involves other smart devices such as smart sensors.

Smartphone Direct Control is the simplest way to control home appliance, lights or fans with smart switches It relies on point-to-point communication. This document explains Smartphone Direct Control only.

As shown in Fig. 1, a smartphone can be used simply as a remote to control home appliances, lights, or fans with a smart switch. Of course, it is the best remote control! Its friendly user interface can deliver very enjoyable experience, its WiFi signal can work very reliably at relatively long distance, and it can show operation status of home appliances, lights, or fans because of available two-way communication.

Fig. 1. Use Smartphone as a Remote Control

Another way of Smartphone Direct Control is point-to-point control via internet, as shown in Fig. 2. The home appliance，light, or fan is connected to a smart plug-in which is linked to the internet through a wireless router, and then it can be monitored and controlled by a smartphone anywhere as long as the smartphone can have access to the internet via a WiFi access point or via direct web service of a phone service provider. The smartphone can be even thousands miles away from the home appliance.

Fig. 2. Smartphone Direct Control via Internet

Smartphone Direct Control is cool, but unfortunately it is still not automatic. The user is still the one controlling everything manually. For many applications, minimum human intervention is desirable or even essential once the system is set up. To respond to changes in real time, Home System or Building System must be fully automated. The system needs to automatically collect information about a home environment or a building environment, such as temperature, humidity, occupancy, etc., to process the collected information and send control commands to home appliance such as air conditioner, humidifier, etc. All these tasks can be coordinated or performed by a central control hub. For further details, please see another document titled Central Hub Control of Smart Switch.

Thank you very much for your interest in our Smart Switch Products. We are looking forward to hearing from you inquiry. Customization is available. Our talented teams are ready to work closely with you on your home automation projects.