STE VE CASSIDY
Steve lives life on the edge – edge computing, that is – as he explores the world of smart buildings becoming ever smarter
Steve lives life on the edge – edge computing, that is – as he explores the world of smart buildings becoming ever smarter.
My heartfelt thanks go out to Mission, the British tech and hi-fi business, which held the first in-person event I’ve been to for the past 18 months. I picked out my most fetching face mask and pedalled over to just behind John Lewis on Oxford Street, where Zuma – also known as Mission and found at zuma.ai – had a little pop-up shop.
It was demoing a smart light fitting. Imagine a shotgun cartridge embedded in your false ceiling. The vents around the actinically bright LED element double as sound wave exits for the rear-mounted speaker drivers. This tube fits into the form factor of the old, hot, incandescent element downlighters we identify as “stylish and modern” in the strange terminology of home decorations.
But the visible parts and the lumps of wiring accompanying the device don’t give the full story. In essence, Mission is delivering a baby Alexa speaker that can federate with its nearby siblings. That changes the proposition from being a localised Muzak-piping novelty, to being a floor-shaking, phone-controlled, configurable smart room upgrade.
The last time I went near a new computerised audio system was w in the Royal Albert Hall. On that occasion, the system builders didn’t want anybody’s dodgy old iPod plugging into their amplifier rack. This time, Mission’s team and I wasted a half hour scrolling through playlists as we tried to work out the best tracks to test the limits of the system.
Perhaps intentionally, this stopped me from whipping back various curtains and fittings in search of the subwoofer. I was counting fittings and I guess that pegs my expertise level as an acoustician, because I saw eight little downlights but couldn’t work out how they produced the volume levels and penetrating bass that characterise most of my favourite music – which meant I was still poking around the demo room when someone said something out of the ordinary. Being quite voice-activated myself, I asked what that word was, and how it came to be used in connection with a humble connected lightbulb?
“Sidereal,” they repeated. “We have voice-controlled apps for sidereal lighting configurations.” It’s an odd term, because in other fields it pertains to methods of measuring time of day by apparently fixed, distant stars. Here, it has mutated to refer to the theory that you ought to light up your rooms to imitate the presence, and passage, of a large yellow ball of fire in the sky. This apparently confers benefits in stress levels, attention spans and might even allegedly make you look more interesting on Zoom.
While this is a simple idea, complexities arise when implementing it. Should you, for one thing, allow users to pick the axis of precession, so that one office cubicle lines up on the position of the office building on the planet, whereas the next one along is five hours’ time
shifted to assist its inhabitant visiting from the US? Having these features voice-controlled is all very modern, but you need to think your way through a field of jargon to assemble an instruction for a little fleet of light bulbs to transport you instantly from a damp Dagenham morning to high noon in the ruins of Carthage.
While the initial list of applications for a lightbulb/speaker/microphone might seem low on business utility, many unexpected benefits stem from the whole style of an invisible, infinitely configurable command system for a room or a house. For one thing, Star Trek Picard fans will immediately notice that the Zuma user looks exactly like Riker when he’s telling his house to scan the neighbourhood for bad guys; something about talking to the ceiling shifts your posture, very differently from shouting at a blob on the desk.
The little pop-up shop behind John Lewis might still be there when this mag hits the streets, so if you’re in the area, pop by and try out your favourites on Mission’s little speakerlights. No appointment necessary.
Smarter again
When people talk smart (anything from devices to cities), there are some rich providers of confusion in the mix. My favourite right now is the cloud. Not the one that you and I understand, privately and as techies: the other cloud. The one that is vaguely imagined by great chunks of the regular populace, who by now have simply smooshed together all our carefully detailed descriptions.
Their cloud isn’t owned by anybody, costs nothing to use, has perfect resilience and is unfettered by topography or the rule of law. This is a multifaceted misunderstanding, of course, which only comes to light when a failure in the real, messy, multi-owner, connection-constrained cloud lays another bit of the world’s biggest jigsaw open to view.
To an extent, smart cities are like a cloud. Everything is spread out, but connected; redundancy of the design is assumed rather then baked in.
What looks like all the same network tech is actually a patchwork of owners, operators and users, with strangely mixed expectations about security and segregation. On the one hand, a fleet of smart sensors are meant to be for the public good; on the other hand, the owners of the networks those sensors talk through are not put there for public-benefit projects. This puts the information that they collect out of everyone else’s reach.
And then on the other, other hand, smart cities are nothing like a cloud at all. Buildings don’t scale up and down at random; overall reliability of the systems supporting the humans (remember them?) has to be higher than the overall observed reliability of the common cloud names and the networks over which they reach us. That’s a lot of moving parts.
Resilience in cloud architectures is like having an army of zombies at your command. It doesn’t matter if a few punters lose their transaction from an outage because another zombie will instantly be along to help. Resilience in smart buildings is more like a superhero. No matter what goes on outside of your walls, your smart building ought to have the local horsepower and deployment of tools to fight almost anything the world can throw at it.
Making a massive global network across the globe just to run some local services is becoming the defining sin of the smart building revolution. Yes,
of course there are other networks that tick some of the same boxes and use the same jargon, but they’re either non-time-critical or their field of interest isn’t obvious to their human users. And humans must be able to keep on functioning, even when the internet is having a bad day.
This requirement of natural resilience becomes exceptionally sharp when there is a large-scale, global disruption of internet traffic. If you’re going to make quite minor systems “computerised” then it’s no use trying to run them from a data centre halfway round the planet when all you want is to switch on a few of Mission’s smart light fittings.
This is where the more businessfocused idea of edge computing comes in.
For greybeards like me, this harks back to the old days of strictly local, cloud-independent horsepower. For the more modern generations, though, it’s something of a revelation. Thus the very gentle introduction I had by Brainbox.ai, which makes AI-cooked building-control systems, aimed at making classic glass-wall skyscraper HVAC systems better at saving greenhouse gases.
If you have a massive sandstorm coming, and your internet access is above-ground on poles at various points, you both want to do strange things to your building’s systems (to keep the sand damage to a minimum) but without benefit of internet access. That requires a lot of “internetising” of any information your building might be able to collect, whether that’s heat from the sun, wind speed, temperature or the amount of rain.
And internetising means that you could easily have a rich variety of sensor manufacturers, with an equally rich range of responses to a loss of connection to the rest of the world. Well-behaved sensors hold on to their IP addresses, and don’t worry too much about using public-access DNS to find their way home.
Unfortunately, smart building devices tend towards two extremes: too small and dumb to live on their own and formidably complex. One friend developed and sold a doorbell that booted up much of a Linux kernel, and spoke IPv6 across your LAN to its cloud-based central controller, before putting a picture up on the company intranet of whoever just pushed the button on that funny-looking, oversized entry phone thing. To be resilient against entire-planet internet damage, you must design the entirety of your smart building system to be “unplug friendly” – or at least, to fall back into a failsafe mode that does minimum harm to the building’s human population despite the lack of operating humidity sensors on the east wing.
In fact, if you step back and think about it, you’ll notice that most of the smart city advertising material creates an impression of immediacy. You might see a flashing red box and zoom in to get live video of a crashed milk float, shock horror! In fact, successful smart IoT deployments are less time-critical: if your printer’s toner tips into low today, it’s unlikely to run out until a few days’ time. Moving into more immediate reporting and control, an HVAC system must be able to adjust the flow of air, as buildings respond to the changing conditions of the day, and the constant activity and movement of inhabitants makes that job a lot harder – which, in edge computing terms, means more local decisionmaking, less cloud backchat, and more responsive control systems. Which is great, if your building is
just modern enough. Not brand new, which means potentially loaded with the wrong kind of smarts by enthusiastic but misguided bricksand-mortar developers. Not so old that you’re dealing with lead pipes and mouldy thatch, birds’ nests and deathwatch beetle, either.
Most of the interest in developing smart buildings is focused in on the building stock from about the 1950s through to the early 2000s; the kind of places where even the first couple of retrofit moves – a smart switch to the fan extractor in the server room, or maybe a CCTV webcam pointing into the parking area – shows enough benefit that a larger investment in this technology looks worthwhile.
Brainbox claims many excitable things about its approach to an edge-deployed cloud device smart monitoring and control server. I’m sure it will find a market that agrees with its assertions, but I’ve already seen several false starts in other, very similar markets, where people frankly turn out to be pretty scrappy building owners and their systems reflect that, being made up of half-a-dozen nasty old boxes running embedded Windows 98 to drive everything from the air handler to the cargo bay lift. Tidying and adding resilience to those kinds of “version 0.7” smart networks is a revenue stream I am, I must freely admit, looking forward to a lot.
“You must design your smart building system to be ‘unplug friendly’”