Mouser’s Mini Smart Home Is Full of Big Ideas

This blog post is the first in a series looking back at the Embedded World conference last week. 2022 saw the return of the in-person event, and there were lots of exciting things to see! 

Hassan and Rafik from Mouser showed us their smart home setup, using a fully working model showing motor control, Bluetooth mesh lighting, and air quality sensing as part of a unified setup.

As the video mentions, the motorized door uses an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense board along with a SparkFun motor controller, but interestingly it also had a vibration sensor. This opens the door to AI-assisted condition-based monitoring among other useful use cases. 

The Bluetooth mesh system is also interesting in that it's almost entirely plug and play and very friendly to software development focussed approaches. It uses the Silicon Labs Thunderboard Sense 2. Alongside the RGB LED example, controlled by a companion smartphone app, the board's multiple sensors make it a great prototyping kit.

These are all things we've seen before and talk about often on the Electromaker Show (in fact, we've given a bunch of Thunderboard Sense 2 boards away as prizes), but it was great to see them working live in a prototype scenario!

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