Products and technologies capable of providing the service Nigel promises currently exist today. As a matter of fact, the phrase “smart home” is not a new one; a Google search will result in hundreds of articles and images all depicting products and services for home automation. In this relatively new market, manufacturers race to develop products that offer home automation capabilities but alongside each product also lies its own platform leaving a plethora of products with multiple different communication methods. However, what appears to be consistent among these products is the incorporation of the smartphone to provide the user a readily available peripheral for all the controls that have now become digitized. Regardless of the capabilities technology has displayed, in most commercially available products, functionality is typically aimed toward a specific function or request. A harder phrase for search engines to return relevant results is “all-inclusive smart home”, this is because few exist. Several large players are starting to emerge though, such as the likes the Amazon Echo. They will soon become the norm, pushing out the less impressive single controller products. In fact, we predict that any new products attempting to imitate a smart home solution using a design constrained to a specific function will quickly become obsolete.

Objectives:
     Our ambition for project Nigel is to steer away from common trends and implement a cost effective, multi-standard, all-inclusive smart home system. The goal of Nigel is to reinvent any kind of living space through the use of a series of integrated controllers incorporating sensors and user interfaces. We envision Nigel to support three main initiatives; Efficiency, Convenience, and Control. Project Nigel will maximize efficiency by means of power monitoring, provide complete home control conveniently from any location via a mobile device; as well as, give total remote control to any home owner.

Motivation:
     We chose our project simply because of the diversity of obstacles that will be faced when implementing project Nigel. Having three EE’s and one dual EE/CpE group members we wanted a project that catered to our individual strengths and challenged our weaknesses. We also wanted to maximize this experience and allow it to supplement our individual interests’ and felt that home automation was not only broad enough, but also scalable enough to accommodate each of group members’ respective chosen career path.