The Story of Hoyo Home

About 5 years ago we had a request from a client to look into smart home solutions and find viable options for a multi-tenant system. We bought a lot of IoT devices for home automation and did some experiments with them. They all worked as expected and were quite reliable but they all had one problem that did not satisfy our needs. They were all dependent on an internet connection and each vendor had their own mobile app to control the devices. In our opinion, this was bad for the user experience so we set up for a challenge to create a unified experience where the users could only use a single mobile app to control all IoT devices in their home.

Our initial idea was to figure out their APIs and create a single mobile app that could integrate different vendors, but quickly we realized that most of the IoT providers do not offer open API documentation or even access to their cloud infrastructure. We managed to integrate some vendors but that did not cover our needs.

Next, we decided to take things even deeper and got into the underlying IoT protocols (MQTT, Zibgee, Z-Wave, and now Matter). Here is where we found a more unified approach from all vendors and easier access to the IoT devices. The idea and foundations for Hoyo Home HUB were born.

Since we had access on the protocol level to communicate with the devices and control them we decided to create our own HUB, a central local server that would directly communicate with all IoT devices over a local network and eliminate the cloud architecture currently used. 

This brought up a lot of benefits:

1.  First, all communication was local and we eliminated the need for constant internet access to have remote control of your devices;
2. We introduced our all-in-one display with Hoyo Home HUB that would act as both a control unit and server for the devices;
3. All communications between the IoT devices and the Hoyo Home HUB are encrypted in real-time;
4. The user can still use a mobile app for remote access if the central Hoyo Home HUB is connected to the internet. (there is no need for each individual device to be connected to the internet separately)
5. By eliminating the vendor's cloud servers no data harvesting is done;
6. All data analysis is done directly on the Hoyo Home HUB

This approach makes us one of the few smart home solutions that provide both offline and online usage.

Even with this local approach we still were able to integrate a multi-tenant doorbell solution directly into the system and our smart home solution can be used as a video doorbell for multi-tenant buildings while still preserving total isolation for each tenant.

Our system is now available and can be fully tested at one of our offices in Struga and Skopje and also in the Show Room apartments available at East Gate Living.