Smart home touches all aspects of the house, in order to make it smarter. We had seen that when buying sashes, it was now possible to opt for a smart home solution. The same is true today in the world of lighting. Whether you are looking for a designer lamp, an outdoor wall lamp, a wall lamp, a ceiling lamp, etc., there are many solutions available today. The best known are undoubtedly those of Philips Hue, or Osram. But there are others, such as the Smart Friends solution, discovered by chance on the luminaire.fr website, which specialises, as its name suggests, in lighting.
When you are looking for a luminaire, you will usually find the site with the same name, which is specialized in the field and offers a wide range of products for all tastes. I was looking for lighting with natural materials for our chalet, based on wood or hemp, for example, and I discovered that they now also offer a “smart” section.
There are of course well-known products, such as Osram, or Philips Hue, whose many applications directly integrating the Hue technology, often little known, can be discovered. Philips does not only offer smart bulbs, although this is what we see most often. There are many ready-made wall lights and suspensions.
But the site also offers other brands, sometimes simply controllable with a remote control, sometimes really smart, to both control its lighting, but also to have an eye on its house, some bollards or external wall lights having the good idea to integrate a camera, a little like what Netatmo offers with its Presence, or Bosch. A rather ingenious and discreet idea: D
This led me to discover the Steinel Smart Friends Box solution, a German smart hub that allows you to control your lighting, but also many equipment from Steinel, of course, but also Schellenberg (for automation), Paulmann (for lighting), or Abus (for safety).
Steinel is a well-known detector manufacturer in Germany, which offers KNX products, but also Z-wave, which is integrated into this smart home gateway. There are therefore different models of motion sensors, but also of lighting, some of which integrate motion detection, all this communicating in Z-wave, therefore.
Unfortunately, there is little information about this box. The manufacturer announces that all data is saved locally, but it is impossible to say if it is really without Cloud, and what features it offers. On the other hand, it would also include ZigBee, Paulmann products using this communication protocol. Voice control via Amazon Alexa is also possible. If anyone has any information, I’ll take it!