August Updates

abode
abode
Aug 25, 2017 · 5 min read

Hello abode community!

First and foremost, we’re extremely grateful for the referrals, recommendations, and positive feedback you have been sending our way over the past 4–5 months. We have continued to outperform our internal projections/forecasts on new abode homes across the U.S. and Canada. This is largely attributed to the feedback you’ve provided to help make us the best DIY professional-grade home security system.

With that said, we recognize over the past few months that the pace of “innovation” on new features and integrations has slowed (we’re anxious too!). The reason for this is two-fold. The first and most important, is we understand that we are security first platform (with great potential in the connected home / automation space due to our gateway) which has resulted in us focusing on scaling our architecture for higher performance (more systems) and resiliency. We are committed to building an open platform. We’ve made a massive amount of changes to handle the increased load, and unfortunately as much as we tried to design this correctly when we started when we initially designed abode, it’s impossible to predict the loading profile that will be experienced once a product is released. We’re extremely cognizant of the fact that our community depends on abode for extremely critical things like keeping their families and possessions safe, while also using abode to gain access to your homes (connected locks, garage doors, etc). Therefore, its imperative we provide a consistent, rock-solid security experience as the keystone foundation of everything we do.

Secondly, we’ve invested a massive amount of time to improve our streaming camera experience which has very large software effort we’ve been taking on (for the past 3 months) to release soon. More on the latter below in the new camera update.


Integrations / Expanding our Platform

We’re also happy to announce that we are nearing completion on some important integrations that the community has requested. We’ll be rolling these enhancements out over the next 60 days, pending successful certification from our integration partners.

Lights
We’ve been quietly rolling out new firmware updates to your gateway which will allow us to build out local / direct integrations with Philips Hue and LIFX. We have some certification work to perform with these companies, but the local/direct integration, while much more difficult to implement, will provide a better end user experience with less latency (faster response time) and the ability to control these devices using your cell backup connection (if your primary internet is down). Had we taken the cloud approach, this would not have been possible. We also are rolling out an enhanced UI for all light controls (z-wave, etc.).

Here’s a sneak peak at the UI for the LIFX/Hue integration. Note, we’ll also have unique screens for lights that only do brightness:

Thermostat Control (Ecobee + Nest)

We’ve also had our engineers working on thermostat control (both manually and via automations) to be able to integrate EcoBee (all models) and Nest thermostats directly into the abode app! The firmware on the abode gateway is ready to go and our software team are integrating this into our mobile app and web application. Take a sneak peak below:

Google Home

A little further on the horizon is Google Home integration. We’ve built the authentication into Google Home and are working to figure out the best way to integrate as Google provides two different ways to integrate (but we can’t use both). We’re pushing hard to get this wrapped up as quickly as possible within the next 90 days.


New abode devices!

We’re excited to announce, based on your feedback, we will begin offering for pre-sales (with delivery in the next 3–4 weeks) the following devices:

— Outdoor Siren with Strobe
— Recessed Door Sensor
— Slim Door Strip (which fits in a gap between the frame and the door)
— 1080P Streaming Camera
— Acoustic Smoke Listener

All of these devices will use our abodeRF which offer extremely long battery life and range. While the door sensors will offer the same level of functionality as our existing door contact, they will offer home owners a more transparent install that fit the character of their home. We don’t ever want to be intrusive and love to blend into the background of your home.

Camera + Streaming Engine

Say hello to our new 1080 (wifi) camera. 2-way voice build into hardware (software release later this year)

The 1080P camera also comes with some exciting enhancements. We’re rolling out our new, enhanced streaming engine that provides a much more fluid stream and adaptive bit rate that measures the bandwidth your mobile device has to offer an optimal stream. We’re fine tuning all of the variables like upload speeds, download speeds, and transcoding capabilities to make this all happen. Note, our current streaming camera will also benefit from these enhancements.

Our acoustic smoke device will allow you to install the device to “listen” for a North American smoke alarm alert to alert you via the abode app. No need to replace your existing smoke detectors!

Automation Engine

We’ve implemented complex automation logic on the gateway and are now working on the User Interface to ensure this is easy. This is a major push to ensure we can offer the ability to create complex automations (i.e. if this happens AND this happens, then do this) via locally connected and cloud connected devices. We’re also working on “conditions” of when these events should occur (i.e. during sunset, only when all the phones are outside of the home, when the system is in this mode). We are striving for excellence and don’t want to make this a “programming language”. In other words, everyone should have the ability to create automations, and we’re intent on making sure the UI allows that. We’ll be posting a more in-depth deep dive on the automation engine in the coming weeks and what we are planning, including a library of community created automations, ideas for devices you own, and rules engine to allow you to maximize the utility out of all the capabilities of the abode engine.

Garage Door

We’re working on a garage door opener integration and will be sharing more about that in the next month.

Wrap Up

We will be communicating more frequently moving forward based on (shoutout) to our awesome Reddit /r/abode community which has stressed the important of these updates. We never want to disappoint and will be posting more up to date timelines. We have to get certification from 3rd parties on many of these, so therefore can’t give you an exact date but are working on pushing these integrations as quickly as we can over the next 60 days (some sooner).

We really appreciate all of your feedback, and welcome it! Please keep it coming

PS — know anyone great in customer service? We’re hiring in our San Francisco, CA office. Send them our way here.

Thanks,

The entire abode team!

)

abode

Written by

abode

DIY Home security & Automation. Beautiful hardware with easy to use software. No contracts. http://goabode.com

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