Yale unlocks door to wave of Nest Weave IoT inventions

Home automation vendor Nest Labs has announced the first home IoT product to use its Nest Weave protocol. Meanwhile, dozens of manufacturers are working on products with backing support from Qualcomm and Silicon Labs, it says.

The ‘damn breaking’ Nest Weave invention is a new IoT-connected Linus Locke by Yale. Nests’ web site lists a variety of device manufacturers working on devices that can use the Weave communication protocol. Weave was designed specifically to overcome the communications challenges faced when working with power-constrained devices and those that need conditions of low latency and redundancy.

The Nest Weave can run over Wi-Fi and Thread but its simplicity makes it more reliable, compact, secure and scalable than existing IoT protocols, according to Nest. Thread helps it create a self-healing mesh network so that if a device crashes or Wi-Fi goes down, other devices on the network will keep working. This, says Nest, is especially important for safety and security products, like smoke alarms or security systems.

Latency and range are two other critical factors in low power IoT, says Nest. Any time lag involved in switching on lights or unlocking doors will dampen enthusiasm for home IoT before it has developed, it claims, so Nest Weave is designed to ensure instant response time, with end-to-end latencies of less than 100ms promised, even on large mesh networks. Nest Weave contains code that enables each powered device to act as a wireless extender to route information. The protocol is compact and runs on single devices with as little as 64KB of RAM. A single battery can power a device for a number of years, according to the vendor.

The Linus Lock by Yale is the first connected residential door lock to let people check if the door is open or closed and set up passcodes providing different levels of access for family members and guests. Users can even remotely check, lock and unlock the door. It was named after Yale founder Linus Yale, who invented the original cylinder pin-tumbler lock in 1843.

“The Linus lock was created with the Nest home in mind, working with Nest and taking advantage of Nest Weave,” said Jason Williams, general manager at Yale Locks & Hardware.

Among the companies developing IoT products using Nest Weave are GE’s branded lighting controls division, Hunter Douglas, P&G, Philips, SkyBell, Tyco and WeMo. In addition, Google’s OnHub router will work with Nest Weave in the future. Qualcomm and Silicon Labs will provide Nest Weave-certified kits and support.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU-vKAiPwgg

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