TL;DR:

This blog post explains my work as R&D Manager / Project Manager between 2013-2018, which I designed 1st android / Linux Home Automation touch panels developed & manufactured in Turkey.

Introduction

Touch Panels used in Home Automation market are usually embedded devices, with Android/Linux OS and custom hardware interfaces such as KNX.

KNX is an open standard (see EN 50090, ISO/IEC 14543) for commercial and domestic building automation. [1]

Figure 1 Home Automation Touch panels

TouchPanels used in Home Automation market provides multiple functionalities, such as:

- Home Automation Visualization
- Home Automation Server Device
- Mobile App gateway
- SIP Intercom Client
- Site Management Client
- Misc. (Weather, News, RSS…etc.)

Figure 2 Typical Infrastructure for Home Automation for an apartment

These devices are usually embedded devices, with Android/Linux OS. Since they are used in Home Automation networks, they need to have corresponding hardware interfaces and software built-in.

In Europe / Middle East markets, most popular home automation bus is still a wired one: KNX. KNX Association has more than 400 manufacturers with thousands of devices which are compatible with KNX protocol.

Design & Implementation

Design & Development of such complex devices needed expertise on multiple disciplines, such as:

• Industrial / Mechanical Design
• PCB Schematic / Layout Design
• Android / Linux Board Bring up
• User Space App Design

For this case, I will not go deeper, but provide photos, and some high-level design documents:

Mechanical Designs

Figure 3 Interra5 Mechanical Design

PCB Design

Figure 4 Interra4 and Interra5 PCBA

Board Bring up

I personally ported Android AOSP and Linux Debian 7/8 to all that hardware, depending on the use-cases. Since it is a wide topic, I will not go deeper.

User Space App Design

I also lead software team to develop user space apps for touch panels, as well as mobile apps as seen in below photos:

Figure 5 Home Automation Apps

Conclusion

During my work as R&D / Project Manager, I developed 5 generations of Android / Linux Touch panels to be used in Home Automation projects with KNX Protocol.

Hundreds of thousands of private homes / apartments / buildings / offices are using these products with a reliable KNX bus connection.

References

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KNX_(standard)