Have a bit of experience in this field, on a technical side:<p>- Always provide a way to auto update and fallback if failed.<p>- never implement a buzzer or beeper.<p>- stay away from blue status leds. people really dislike them, especially in the bedroom.<p>- always design with sleep/low power mode functionality. If it's embedded uC: 1 watt is more than enough, even with RF. Pick bistable relays. If it's a Linux SoC aim for less than 3W. If there's wifi keep it under 21 dBm. Pick sps modules like 78SRxx from murata instead of linear 78xx.<p>- if it's a thing you plug in the wall socket make sure it doesn't obstruct other sockets.<p>- expect people to unplug it every moment every day.<p>- don't force people to provide an email to activate some functionality or feature.<p>- use open source standards for communication protocols and put yours in a public datasheet with detailed info on how to parse & process.
I just heard a talk with Sproutling's CEO Chris Bruce. He really recommended reading this book: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/From-Concept-Consumer-Ideas-Money/dp/0137137478" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/From-Concept-Consumer-Ideas-Money/dp/0...</a><p>You should also attend the SF Hardware Startup meetup, run by my friend Nick Pinkston (great guy): <a href="http://www.meetup.com/HardwareStartupSF/" rel="nofollow">http://www.meetup.com/HardwareStartupSF/</a><p>You should also come and join us at the Hackendo::Integrate conference in April: <a href="http://hackendo.techendo.co/" rel="nofollow">http://hackendo.techendo.co/</a>
I think the "Unix Philosophy" is way ahead on this one. <a href="http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch01s06.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch01s06.html</a><p><pre><code> Rule of Least Surprise: In interface design, always do
the least surprising thing.
Rule of Silence: When a program has nothing surprising to
say, it should say nothing.
Rule of Repair: When you must fail, fail noisily and as
soon as possible.</code></pre>
Very good solution outlook. The main concern I have is: "Design for scale of everything", given the example of 200 bulbs. That's exaggerated, but how about you have 200 of IoT at home? Do you use 200 or 100 apps to control them?<p>This is the problem of Nest which has the architecture of producing one thing after another controlled by smart phones. This architecture does not scale.