Installing connected-home lighting is often costly and complicated. A new startup called Avi-On is trying to change this, starting with the seemingly mundane light switch.
Avi-On's Bluetooth LE-based system consists of a mobile app, a light bulb, and a capacitive-touch light switch. Once installed you can set up lighting schedules, control bulb brightness, reposition a light switch in your home, or add customizable lighting to a previously unlit area. Using mesh networking (the same concept employed by the off-the-grid chatting app Firechat), pieces in the system can talk to one another without needing to be connected to a Wi-Fi network. This makes Avi-On modular and simple to set up: Just sync the hardware to the app in-app, and you're ready to go.
Avi-On is by no means the first to tackle the issue of connected home lighting. Home automation has a long history, but it's typically rooted in complication: the need to hardwire your home, add control panels into the walls, or set up some wireless hub that all the devices talk to. This was usually only feasible if you owned your home, and had a handful of benjamins to spare. The Phillips Hue lights are perhaps the closest thing to what Avi-On is doing, but because it uses the ZigBee standard, its system requires a wireless hub to link everything together. By relying on Bluetooth LE, Avi-On doesn't require you to thread wires through your walls, and that wireless hub is just your iOS or Android phone.
The key here is also how affordable the individual pieces are and how they work together under a single app (something HomeKit should eventually bring some parity to for iOS users), without the need for any extra hardware.
Avi-On's series of products all cost under $40, and primarily fall in the $25 to $35 range. For starters, these include six GE Bluetooth Smart products (a light dimmer, a light switch, an indoor plug, an indoor dimmable plug, and an outdoor plug), on top of the aforementioned light bulb and switch, which you can mix and match to suit your home lighting needs. You can preorder Avi-On's suite of connected lighting products starting today. They will go on sale starting in March.
