Fuelling smart homes: an Open Source solution from Huawei

21st December 2015
Fuelling smart homes: an Open Source solution from Huawei
HiLink ( inset, Android app) is the language that gadgets at home will 'speak' ... a display at Huawei headquarters in Shenzhen, China.(Photo Vishnu Anand / IndiaTechOnline)

In 2016,  Gadgets in your home, will talk to each other in a common lingo, through a single app
From  Vishnu Anand in Shenzen, China
'Connected home', 'Internet of things', 'intelligent devices' -- these buzzwords have been around for some time now, with no concrete products and services that tie them together. A few days back at its second anniversary celebrations in Shenzhen, China, Honor, the e-brand owned by Huawei, unveiled its strategy to make smart homes   truly  smart -- and connected .
Picture this: Your refrigerator, home theatre system, microwave, and air conditioner use the same operating system and are controlled remotely by your smart phone. Honor is making this a reality, by tying up with global partners of all these electronic devices. Honor Lite OS is an all new thin operating system that links all of these devices using a new communication protocol called HiLink – a common universal language for inter-household devices.  
HiLink connects devices from various vendors via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Honor plans to make its Lite OS completely open source to encourage the community to create applications and sync up more devices. At its launch event, Honor announced collaborations with  home appliances maker Haier and  automated  homes  solution provider Broadlink.
The biggest challenge, in developing the operation system was to keep it as lightweight as possible. Since more and more devices would be eventually run on the OS, it has to be agile but light. After all, there is no server running all of it, only a smartphone app controlling all of it.
In order to ensure that buyers like you and me, are able to automate our homes seamlessly, Honor has launched its first bunch of home connectivity products based on the HiLink platform. The new Honor Pro series of routers can clock a speed of 1000Mbps and have a 1GHz ARM CPU and 256MB RAM.
With plans to integrate smart security and smart lighting devices, Honor is all set to help you take control of every single device in your home, even while you are away from home. Let’s say cheers to that.
December 21 2015