Samsung Just Brought the Smart Home a Little Closer to Your Home
Today at Internet of Things World in San Francisco, Samsung took another step towards making smart home technology available to the masses.
Samsung’s Artik 1 module for connected devices is about the size of a ladybug (Samsung Electronics).
Last August, the South Korean electronics giant purchased Smart Things, creator of a popular open-source platform for smart home devices. At last January’s Consumer Electronics Show, the company vowed to give $100 million to developers building new IoT devices for that platform.
Today, Samsung announced new hardware that makers of connected devices can use to bring their creations to market more quickly, as well as tools that make it easier for these gizmos to talk to each other.
Related: The Smart Homes of the Future Ain’t What They Used to Be
What does this mean for consumers? If you thought we were already drowning in “smart” IoT devices, just wait. A flood of new connected devices should appear over the next 12 months. And, unlike the various incompatible smart home systems available today, these devices will be able to work together seamlessly.
Samsung does the heavy lifting for IoT
Samsung’s new Artik hardware will allow gadget makers to create innovative solutions without having to think about sourcing the components, building their own operating systems, or managing their security, says Young Sohn, president and chief strategy officer for Samsung Electronics.
(Samsung Electronics)
Samsung unveiled three types of Artik modules for different types of devices. The Artik 1 is a tiny chip that contains a processor, flash memory, a motion sensor, and low-power Bluetooth. It’s designed for activity trackers, location beacons, and IoT sensors.
The quarter-sized Artik 5 ups the processor power and storage significantly and adds Wi-Fi and video handling to the mix. It’s designed for smart home hubs, smart watches, IP-based cameras, and drones.
Artik 10 is essentially the brains of a Samsung smartphone, made available to other product manufacturers; it’s aimed at home servers, media hubs, and personal cloud devices.
Samsung also announced it was building hardware-level encryption and authentication into every Artik product. This should prevent malware and other other unauthorized software from running on any device that uses it — a potentially huge problem for notoriously insecure IoT devices.
Related: Your Smart Home Will Be Hacked. Here’s How to Stop It.
Samsung is making the chips and software available to select IoT makers today. The company has not announced broader availability, or what the software development kit will cost.
One smart protocol to rule them all
Currently, there are roughly half a dozen prototyping options for IoT makers — from Intel Edison to Electric Imp and Spark Photon — and at least that many competing smart home operating systems.
By making the Artik and SmartThings platforms open to developers — and throwing its considerable money and market presence behind them — Samsung hopes to create an enormous ecosystem for connected appliances that will allow consumers to install smart home products without having to worry about whether they will work with the stuff they already own. And, of course, it will help Samsung sell even more smart appliances.
The $200 billion company, which ships more than 600 million electronics products every year, has a better shot at making the smart home a reality than any other company except perhaps Apple, which has yet to reveal the details of its smart home plans. We may learn more about the latter at Apple’s WorldWide Developers Conference next month.
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