There are quite a few ways do home automation today. You could standardize on a particular technology such as z-wave, insteon, zigbee or any other technology for that matter. One thing is for sure, the whole setup will get outdated very quickly and you will soon feel jealousy pangs when your friends have the cooler newer toys.
Recently, the trend has been to incorporate transceivers for various protocols in a device that does more than one thing. My previous blog about Piper was about exactly that. A all-in-one device that had various sensors, a wide angle camera, siren, and a transmitter for z-wave devices. The concept is very cool. Now there are quite the few more devices that do that and more. There are two that of interest to me right now. One is the Revolv which is a great concept and will probably get a lot of traction. Another is Soap. Today I am looking at the Soap Router. I would love to read up more about Revolv and compare that as well at another time.
So what is Soap?
A quad-core ARM based Processor running Android as its base OS that supports 802.11AC WIFI. Support for Parental Controls, Virus and Malware protection. This would make it a router. And this is what makes it cooler.
- Transceivers for Zigbee, Z-wave, Insteon, Bluetooth, Wemo, TCP, Vuezone and RFID/NFC.
- Using Android as its base OS, there are limitless options now available. Here are some of the things their kickstarter campaign envisions that it could do.
- Let you know when your kids leave the house
- Alert you if you dog gets out of the backyard
- Let you know if you dog is barking too loud
- Turn on your TV when you enter the room
- Turn on and off lights as walk in and out of parts of your home
- Let you know if you forgot your wallet or cell phone before you leave your home
- The higher end model actually has a touch screen that lets you control certain settings.
- Higher end model also comes with 32 GB space that would be used for storing certain profiles for your home and a lot more.
- Ability to mirror computers on the network (Very tech-geek James Bond-ish) and I like it. Great to see what your rebellious teenagers are up to lately. (I still recommend talking to them directly but sometimes you have to)
- It also lets you trap a potential hacker by setting up “bait” for him/her.
- Block ads, popups, phishing scams (really can use this when the in-laws are in town. Click, click, click. click everything!!!
Soap is supposed to be released in November of 2014. Which is a very long time. Usually what happens when a great product comes to a crowd funding site like Kickstarter is that someone else with a lot more money will go ahead and create a similar product and come out with it sooner to totally annihilate the efforts of true genuine engineers and visionaries that purely want to create something to solve something. So such efforts end up being more academic in nature and provide the stepping stones of where the industry will turn next.
Did I just say that Soap will fail and disappear? I sure hope not. I hope it succeeds and makes a lot of money along the way.
Would like to lean more about SOAP? Head on to their campaign on kickstarter. Or you can do to their website.
UmairShafiq 
Looks like an interesting product – seems like a better feature set than the almond+ – thanks for pointing it out, glad I read the rest of the article rather than relying on the video as it’s the multi protocol that makes it cool rathe than the parental control. They really need that battery.