Client Overview
Connected Home and Security brand of a fortune 500 company with products like smoke detectors/ alarms, extinguishers, cookware, home fragrance, food storage, etc. making the world a better and safer place
Business Challenge
Launch a next-generation connected smoke detector product from sketch to scale within the same year starting from concept to product launch with following special features:
- Cater both iOS and Android consumers with high start rating app
- Connected Product with HomeKit compliance as well as Non-Homekit based product over BLE for iOS consumers
- Provide wireless and wireline interconnect of safety devices in a home for alarm announcement with location information
- Eliminate external Alexa Echo device dependency and embed virtual assistant into fire safety product to control smart home appliances via voice commands
- Support multi-lingual voice services for Alexa: US English, French, Canadian and Spanish with audio quality exceeding Amazon Echo and Google Home performance
- Support to Bluetooth speaker for content streaming via mobile from services like Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify etc.
- Battery life of five years
- The product has to pass Fire Safety Standards and Agency Testing
VOLANSYS Contribution
- Architecture design, development, and QA of a Design-to-Manufacture product
- Full ownership of FW development, mobile application development (iOS & Android), and AWS cloud connectivity
- Firmware development
- AC and DC models support
- Code isolation of HomeKit specific code
- Implemented non-HomeKit device and W-Fi provisioning mechanism
- Cloud AWS IoT API and OTA changes in-line to cloud implementations
- FW OTA for Wi-Fi and BLE modules
- Private mesh network over BLE for alarming all devices in a house in case one device detects fire smoke
- Firmware development on top of baseline SDK from semiconductor module vendor
- MQTT agent for AWS cloud connectivity
- End-to-end secured device, firmware, cloud, mobile apps provisioning, and commissioning
- Battery optimization to increase battery life up to 5 years
- Controlled Wi-Fi and BLE radio and optimized transmitting of data when needed
- Implemented power saving by controlling radio module power consumption
- Optimized BLE Mesh algorithm for the broadcasting mechanism
- Architected, developed and deployed Android and iOS mobile application using client’s AWS IoT cloud to support multiple safety devices
- Alerts and notifications
- LED color control
- Device OTA
- Battery status
- Added support of generating mesh communication key in the mobile application for secured device communication
- AWS cloud support
- MQTT based secure cluster implementation
- Device certificate management
- AWS Lambda API implementation
- Continuous Deployment implementation – Code auto deployment
- Push notification configuration
- Upgraded DynamoDB structure for better manageability
- Developed configurable scripts for device OTA and status check
- Upgraded cloud architecture from centralized to a distributed structure to make it fault tolerant
- Developed user dashboard – Python-based web application for device search, user search, device diagnosis, log details, etc
- Alexa skills development for device status check
- Production and design team support, manufacturing test, flashing and factory serialization utility development
- Conducted end-to-end manual and automated testing (sanity and regression analysis)
- Support client’s internal Deliverable Acceptance testing
Solution Architecture
Benefits Delivered
- Enriched client’s safety device capabilities with seamless audio and mesh connectivity that helped them upsell the product
- Helped customer grab higher market share with Android as well as iOS with non-HomeKit support added to control safety devices
- Being one-stop solution provider, it reduced the hassle of multi-vendor support, coordination time and accelerated the product launch timelines
- Delivered an edge against a competitor with faster time-to-market
- Enabled safety agency certification on the first go to achieve safety standards compliance