DIY motorized home

There’s a new trend in the world, called “Internet of Everything”, which, briefly stating, means that everything will be connected to the internet, from your devices, to your refrigerator, car, home, everything. This is a cool idea but I think something is fundamentally missing from that concept and that is action, motorized action. In other words, while everything will be known or perceived and shared via the internet, nothing will actually happen in the real world, since there are no motors involved.

There are attempts to create a fully automatized houses, where everything that can move is motorized, e.g. doors, drawers, maybe even chairs. These are extremely expensive attempts and are implemented in specific, research-oriented houses.

I propose to create a Do-It-Yourself motorized home, by designing a motor-box that can be applied to anything that can move in the house, e.g. cabin doors, front doors, drawers, etc. The box will contain the following components: (i) a motor; (ii) a hinge-based driving system; (iii) a circuit-board with the motor controller and a wi-fi board to connect to a local network; (iv) an easy-to-remove battery pack. The whole box should be relatively small, to fit inside drawers and such.

When a box is installed inside a drawer, the hinge-based driving system is connected to the moving part and the box to the fixed part. With a local ip-address that transmits and receives the current position of the motor, one can control the motor. The removable battery pack is set to make it easily installable and replaced.

Consider a house filled with these types of boxes, wherein all the doors, drawers and other movable objects can be totally controlled from afar, either via your smartphone or even from your office. For handicapped people that could make all the difference and for healthy people that could simply make life easier and cooler.