Intelligent home devices and appliances can do many impressive elements, especially when working with a single order or automated scenario. Almost all these smart home products and platforms have an intrinsic and almost non-negotiable dependence on the cloud and, therefore, an internet connection. After the IoT industry trends, Samsung also evolves its SmartThings platform with a new SmartThings edge structure that, in a word, will allow such smart devices to work more quickly, safer and from more reliable way by taking on the internet outside the equation.
The last few years have seen an almost obsessive movement towards the “cloud”, the more the term to the management of the fashionable words to calculate the resources and processes pushed to more powerful but remote computers. Recently, however, there has been a new movement that resumes part of this control and responsibility for local devices or hubs, which is now called “Computing Edge”, which is the place where SmartHings Edge takes its name.
Technically, SmartThings Edge is a new architecture and a new development framework for developers of smart home products to take advantage of this new computer computer movement. Rather than pass through the roundabout process to send cloud commands only for the actions to occur locally, all actions occur on the SmartChings hub. This would result in a faster processing of orders for devices that sit on a local home network.
This means that in practice that smart homes can work even when there is no available Internet connection because all information and processing are available locally. Developers can create automations that only work on local networks or the connection via local wireless communication protocols. At launch, SmartHings Edge will support Zigbee, Z-Wave and LAN-based integrations, but the material support, previously known as the project chip, is on the roadmap.
This will not happen by magic, of course, and developers will have to use the new SMARTTHINGS EDGE API to write device drivers that will occur. Although this involves more work to support it, it could be the edge that Samsung’s smart home’s home platform has totally intended game points.
