Many in One

The story of the Tower of Babel teaches us that stagnation and confusion can ensue when the community does not have a common language. In today's world, your own smart home project can fail if the components in your Internet of Things (IoT) community do not understand each other. So far, the IoT industry has not settled on a single, uniform language for home automation. Instead, various IoT vendors have their own competing communication systems. If you purchase all your IoT gadgets from the same vendor, the whole network will chatter harmoniously, but if you don't want to be locked into a single vendor environment, you might be wondering how you could ever manage these babbling devices from a single interface.

One interesting solution for the IoT Tower of Babel dilemma is ioBroker [1], an extremely capable broker and interpreter for home automation projects. The ioBroker project was launched in 2014, and it continues on with strong support from a dedicated developer community.

What is ioBroker?

ioBroker offers a single user interface for managing IoT devices from several different vendor environments (Figure 1). The ioBroker system comes with a collection of software components called adapters that interface with the various hardware environments. The number of ioBroker adapters has increased from 100 to more than 180, and the count is still increasing. The adapters are installed individually, so you will never have more than you need.

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