Our Vision

It’s all about HOS = Home Operating System

The SmartGrid is not going to be very smart if there are no effective, efficient, and n-way communications between devices in the home/building area network (HAN), the meter, and all the way up to the back office systems in the utilities. Homes and buildings are not going to be very smart if the intelligence to orchestrate energy conservation, generation, and distribution (net zero) exists on a system outside.  And, finally, the consumers are not going to be very happy given limited choices in devices that can shed loads but are not yet intelligent enough to collectively respond to user refined events.

With tens of thousands of installations in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, ISY Series is the only commercially available line of products, retailing under $300, that can effectively act as the Home’s Operating System which communicates with the Grid (Zigbee SEP), the Internet, and the Consumer while intelligently orchestrating utilization, generation, and distribution of energy based on Utilities Defined and Consumers Refined scenarios. ISY is completely at home with any of the existing – and off the shelf – communicating products such as INSTEON/X10, ZWave, and UPB and thus blends right into existing automated environments, improves upon it, and all with a minimal impact. ISY is easily integrated into any Web Services and/or REST aware system, publishes events at lowest levels of granularity (i.e. someone double pressed a button, the status of an occupancy sensor, wind direction is NE at a speed of 5MPH, etc.), and it is 100% autonomous: no monthly fees and no licensing fees.

In summary, Utilities no longer need to deal with HAN intricacies, the consumers are provided with the broadest possible range of devices, investments in existing automation technologies are seamlessly SmarGrid enabled, and thus energy conservation can start immediately.

Currently, energy management systems are costly and not attuned to mass deployment especially in the residential and small/mid commercial venues. Furthermore, current energy management systems do not utilize inexpensive and off the shelf automation products (such as X10, ZWave, INSTEON, UPB, etc.) and require professional installers. This basically means that none of the existing installations shall be able to take advantage of energy conservation tools and systems: all have to be yanked out in the favor of other devices: a very expensive proposition.

On the other hand, there is a trend towards Server based solutions which not only require always-on Internet Access but also are based on monthly fees. This situation is exacerbated by the lack of comprehensive specification for communication between AMI and the HAN (Home Area Network) which has been trivialized to discrete devices that individually respond to certain signals from AMI. This trivialization creates an environment whereby any meaningful energy conservation requires direct interaction with each individual device not to mention the lack of intelligence when combined with renewable energy sources and other environmental variables/events such as occupancy, climate information, time of day, type of load (i.e. EVs = Electric Vehicles) and any tariff there to, and consumer overridable preferences. In short, a comprehensive solution requires not only communications with devices but also automation and intelligent capabilities at the disposal of the consumers without which any type of energy conservation lacks the scalability and environment friendliness required to make it into ubiquity.

In order to achieve Net-Zero energy usage, there is an acute need for a low cost, secure, self contained Home Operating System (HOS) that utilizes existing technologies and off the shelf products to orchestrate energy utilization, generation, and communications with utilities, renewable energy sources, other events, and consumers. HOS conserves energy by making autonomous intelligent decisions based on energy related events from multiplicity of sources while easily configurable with wizards and methods to make programmatic activities easily understood and implemented by average consumers. HOS shall also be secure and based on an open framework to promote and support emerging and standards based communicating devices (such as Zigbee and HomePlug).

History

The Universal Devices' story began when a group of hardware and software engineers started experimenting with industrial and home automation tools and applications all of which exhibited the same flaw: expensive and centralized servers with proprietary software and protocols communicating with dumb devices.

The prevailing telephone-switch-box paradigm (intelligence without), where all requests are intercepted, routed, transformed, and then communicated to each device did not fit well with the essence of distributed computing and the internet: the devices should be endowed with their own intelligence and thus enable direct communications with each other, with human beings, or with other systems. And thus started the Universal Devices' endeavors in the realm of intelligent devices.

Nine years later, Universal Devices is the only company in the world which offers integrated and turnkey solutions and services for making devices not only Web-Services (WSD and UPnP) enabled but intelligent within.