EVOLUTION REVOLUTION

THE ‘EVOLUTION REVOLUTION’ OF THE CONNECTED HOME

Michael Short, Director of Residential Marketing at Crestron examines how the automation landscape is changing.

Any updating of automation systems must now take a far more holistic approach

In the modern business of home automation, the only certainty is change. Constant, sustained change.

But the evolution of automation platforms isn’t just a one-time thing such as single piece of hardware —it’s about hardware and software evolutions happening in tandem. Over the past 12 months there have been numerous major OS updates to the Crestron Home platform, with one happening on average every six weeks. Constant evolution has allowed us to add quite a bit of functionality this year — with so much more to come.

As Crestron’s Solutions Engineer, Chase Bouchard, likes to point out, a great many of these updates are rooted in dealer feedback, “From developing the right icon to adding third-party devices, it’s the input from people in the field that helps build the best customer experience.”

Which might prompt the question: How exactly does one determine what goes into an update?

Crestron’s Director of Product Management (Residential Solutions) Jason Oster says that the process is really very scientific. “We have a priority list of all possible features and all the devices that we need to support,” he says. “As you can imagine, some things are massive. It could be an eight-month project and we have other things that only take a few weeks.”

An example of the former? Secure remote access. “That was probably a year in the making,” Jason notes. “That update, released in December 2021, meant that dealers no longer had to open ports. The processor reaches out to the cloud, and we have a secure connection,” he explains. “To get it right, to make it secure, and to make it as resilient as possible — it took a while. I think the quality of the work shows because we haven’t had any outages since it was released, with thousands of people using it every single day.”

As far as the variety of features in a new update, Jason says that balance is everything. “A good update, from our perspective, is a real mix of large and small improvements, as well as third-party integration.”

Some further examples of how that work translates into the evolution of residential tech: distributed streaming audio has never sounded better. The signal quality of streaming services has improved dramatically in the past few years, and amplifier and speaker technology now delivers an incredible listening experience that’s astonishingly unobtrusive. (For Crestron, the heart of those systems are the products in the DM NAX line.)

Power control and device health monitoring. The biggest priority for the client is often ‘keep it simple.’ Job one for the modern integrator? ‘Reduce truck rolls.’ The ability to remotely reboot a single device and get status updates from various parts of a home automation system has made life easier for end-users and dealers alike.

The evolution of control. Creating an interface that’s intuitive for the homeowner yet incredibly simple to customise for the integrator was an obvious goal of ours, and building on it has been a priority. The ability to hide or reveal zones and functions quickly, editing lighting scenes and other aspects without the need to be on-site, giving the user control of multiple residences from a single app, making voice control vastly more effective — the list is extensive and evolving. Beyond that, the constant addition of new languages to the platform makes any system truly global.

KNX support. Those two words say it all — KNX support gives dealers throughout the EMEA region use of their preferred automation standard.

Interoperability. If any aspect of home automation is as critical to the ‘now’ as it will be to the future, the ability for any platform to ‘work and play well’ with an expanding universe of quality third-party products and platforms will help make residential integrations reach their true potential. Keeping interoperability top-ofmind gives a client a tremendous number of options beyond a single ecosystem, and when they all function without friction, that’s when technology becomes truly magical.

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