A smart bridge, or smart hub, is a small box that connects to your router wirelessly and turns your house into a more cohesive smart space. Smart bridges are critical to creating a complete modern smart home. In other words, it fills in the gaps that are preventing your home from becoming completely “smart”.
A Smarter Home Bridge
While you can have the smart thermostats, locks, light bulbs, vents, etc. installed in your house, you cannot usually get them to work in synergy or interact with each other. A smart hub is your missing link between your innately smart devices and your Internet network. When all set up and connected, a smart bridge lets you monitor and manage all your smart equipment from your smartphone.
Components
Hardware, firmware, and software are elements integral to a smart bridge’s proper functioning. A smart hub usually packs in a wireless radio, an Ethernet jack, a micro-controller, and an LED bulb. Instructions from your mobile phone are executed using these different components. Though things happen within seconds, the work that happens in the background isn’t that straightforward. A lot of information translation takes place between the smart bridge and your smart devices before a command is executed. And all of this takes place within a fraction of a second.
A smart bridge is typically based on a low-power communication protocol, so that the batteries at work last longer. The power-efficient protocol also offers meshing capability so that you could easily add range extenders to the network.
Plugging It In
The smart bridge directly plugs into your Wi-Fi router or existing gateway, so that it could connect to the Internet. After you establish the Internet connection, data in the form of firmware updates, control algorithm triggers, etc. travel to the bridge from the company’s servers. From there, data gets continually translated into the compatible protocol and gets transmitted.
The Future
The IoT trend is heading toward freedom from different bridges and hubs for multiple devices. Over a period, inexpensive embedded chips and a lot more vigorous wireless networks would permit devices to independently link to the Internet. The various wireless radios being used currently in disparate devices could be rolled into a Wi-Fi router, facilitating a ubiquitous, single device for managing all the Internet connections of a home. Until that time comes, small boxes sitting atop your router would continue to function as the air traffic controller of your house, and bridging connections between your devices, the Internet, and your phone.