Engineering systems of the smart home must be monitored and adjusting their work. Previously, for this, a special control panel was certainly used. But now there are smartphones and tablets with the same functions. We tell how to not guess with the choice.
Photo: jung
Once the portable sensory control panels of the smart home were considered a fashionable and expensive chip, available at the cost not all. Even today, such devices from American manufacturers of smart houses Crestron or AMX are, as a rule, several hundred thousand rubles, and ten years ago they cost more. So this technique still belongs to the suite category, and to equip like panels, probably, it makes sense of engineering systems of a smart home worth about a million rubles. For inexpensive options for smart houses, equipped with Chinese electronics with a total cost of 100-200 thousand rubles, such panels will probably be excessive luxury.
Photo: Creston.
Such devices, however, can be replaced with smartphones and tablet computers without any special problems. Their performance and speed allow you to easily reproduce application programs responsible for the functioning of smart home systems. Of course, absolutely inexpensive and low-power smartphones are better not to choose.
For comfortable control, it is desirable to choose a device with built-in memory with a volume of at least 4 GB, and better than 8-16 GB.
Screen size is also important. Purplify the menu tabs more conveniently on the big screen, 4 inches diagonal models should prefer the device with a larger screen. However, here much depends on the developers of the interface of a particular system of the smart home. If there are not many functions and buttons, then a small smartphone is quite enough for operation. If you plan in parallel with the control of a smart home to use a gadget and as an ordinary pocket computer, then you can advise you to choose a package computers with a diagonal from 10 inches or more. Fortunately, even new models of such computers of prestigious brands are an order of magnitude less than specialized control panels of the aforementioned brands.
For individual rooms, the portable control panel is better to duplicate the stationary panel mounted on the wall as standard wiring products, near the entrance or room output. Such panels will help you manage a smart home in the absence of a portable panel, and the location in the usual place (where the switch) will help not spend time on their search.
In wall panels, functionality can be cut off, but basic functions (light, climate, multi-hum) are presented in them. Although the cost of wall panels from JUNG, Legrand or Shneider Electric with an electronic touch screen is unlikely to be much lower than the cost of the portable tablet. It is also advisable to place wall-mounted control panels in the bathrooms and other rooms with high humidity (choose models of embedded panels with the corresponding level of moisture protection, the IP index should be not lower than 44).