Smart Home Gateway Lights Up the IoT

Lighting is emerging as a key element in the emerging Smart Home, and over the next year, I expect to see in-home lights to start housing many IoT functions, like Wi-Fi nodes, Bluetooth beacons and security features.

In a recent announcement, Gooee, a smart lighting ecosystem provider that connects OEMs to the IoT, has said it’s developed a multi-protocol enterprise IoT gateway that connects lighting and sensing devices to its cloud platform.

It was developed to include a cloud-integrated OS, so the gateway supports multiple communication protocols like Bluetooth, Zigbee and WiFi and Ethernet and Serial ports.

This gateway is engineered for reliability, connectivity and interoperability in order to bring lighting ecosystems closer to full potential.

“In the early stages of our eco-system’s development we planned to work with existing gateway devices, but were unable to find anything that offered the adequate support for our platform to run efficiently and reliably,” said Simon Coombes, CTO, Gooee.  

The Gooee gateway also has an ARM-based processor, operates offline through a local and secure RESTful API and MQTT over WebSockets, and allows third-party service integrations thanks to a localized secure app-container. The gateway will run Gooee’s Bluetooth Mesh, which has been purpose-engineered for its lighting and sensing end-points and is capable of handling the bandwidth needed for the volume of sensing data created.

To complement this new gateway, Gooee has also created and built a device to extend the range and end-point count that the gateway can support. The Puck is a power-over-ethernet to Bluetooth extender device that runs Mesh protocol and works with the gateway to extend the device’s range and increase the number of end-point ‘hubs’ that are managed by the technology.

 “Ensuring we can handle the wide range of environments is critical, so having offline capabilities with a local, security conscious API, and a distributed multi-gateway environment means we offer our customers better performance levels found within costly on-premise hardware,” Simon added. “Many hub and gateway manufacturers claim their devices support thousands of end-points, in some cases tens of thousands. That might be possible if you need a limited amount of control and are just turning groups of lights on and off. At Gooee, we are dealing with individual end-point control and a vast sensory network generating large quantities of environmental and energy data – put simply, our gateway is designed for this kind of enterprise scale.”

Field-testing of the device is already underway, with installations at Gooee’s various facilities and pilot sites.