A smart home that is integrated with a wide range of devices has a great deal of information that it can leverage to take actions on behalf of the homeowners. For example, when the weather is bad a smart home that includes integration with a smart weather station could wake the homeowners up 15 minutes earlier to give them some extra time for their commute to the office.
While automations are the “bread and butter” of a smart home, it is challenging to get a smart home to simply communicate the information it has collected to the homeowners. For example, it is really helpful for the smart home to show the homeowners the current weather conditions and forecast so they can dress properly for the day’s activities. Or, on a Saturday morning when the homeowners are planning their recreational activities for the day, it would be helpful for the homeowners to know if the outdoor air quality is unhealthy so they should plan on indoor activities instead of spending time outdoors.
Professional smart home systems include wall-mounted and table-top touch panels that are integrated with the smart home processor/hub. These work very well for displaying information for the homeowners and are programmed so that the homeowners can use them to control their smart home. However, they tend to be quite expensive and similar products are not readily available for consumer installed smart home platforms.
There are a wide range of smart phone apps that can be used to both control a smart home and view the information provided by IoT devices in a home. These work very well but navigating through apps on a phone when you are trying to get ready for work or getting the family out the door can be frustrating.
Finally, Amazon and Google also manufacture smart displays. However, with these the user has to put up with an ongoing barrage of advertising content.
What is needed is a simple, reasonably priced, display that allows the homeowners to view timely information at a glance.
Introducing the Tidbyt Smart Display
Tidbyt is a retro-styled smart display that provides quick and easy viewing of information from multiple sources. The device has a low-resolution screen, made up of a matrix of individual LEDs. It offers a unique and trendy way to stay updated with personalized information from apps that are selected by the user.
The Tidbyt website includes a library of more than 500 apps that a user can choose from to create a highly customized display that meets their unique needs. In addition, there is also information on how to code apps so Tidbyt users (with some software development skills) can create their own.
The first-generation Tidbyt was launched on Kickstarter in 2021. It raised more than $900,000 from over 5,000 backers. Features of the first-generation Tidbyt include the ability to add multiple apps to the Tidbyt using the manufacturer’s smart phone app and the option of cycling through apps and displaying the information presented by each for a predetermined amount of time. Apps can also be scheduled to only run during specific times of the day so an app displaying traffic information can be scheduled to only run in the early morning when the homeowners are preparing to leave for work, for example.
First-generation Tidbyt also allows display brightness adjustment, and auto dimming can also be used to adjust the brightness based on the time of day. Night mode can dim the display to an appropriate level for sleeping and only display a clock instead of the data from the installed apps. It is available in a walnut or beech wooden enclosure that adds to the retro feel of the device.
Plans for Tidbyt Gen 2
Tidbyt has announced the Tidbyt Gen 2 with a number of noteworthy enhancements to the original design. Tidbyt is currently taking pre-orders through Kickstarter and shipping is promised to begin in May. The enhancements incorporated into the Tidbyt Gen 2 include a new screen that improves the display of both text and images. Also new is a capacitive touch sensor that allows the user to move between apps and interact with them. There is are also new mounting options; the Tidbyt Gen 2 can be placed on a tabletop or shelf, tilted using the included kickstand to optimize the viewing angle, or mounted on a wall.
A 16-Bit Mono Speaker on the Tidbyt Gen 2 will add basic sound capabilities for alarms and alerts, and a molded plastic enclosure replaces the retro-styled wooden enclosure used on the first-generation Tidbyt. The updated Tidbyt also includes Google Home integration with Home Assistant integration promised.
Hands on with the Tidbyt
Tidbyt supplied me with a first-generation Tidbyt for this article. Installation and setup of a was very simple.
- Plug in Tidbyt
- Install the Tidbyt app on your smart phone
- Create an account
- Provide permission for the app to use Bluetooth
- Name the Tidbyt (typically the room where it will be used)
- Enter your location (town, State)
- Connect to WiFi
- Press the “+” button in the app to begin selecting apps to run on the Tidbyt. Or, press the gear icon to adjust the Tidbyt’s settings
Out of the box, the Tidbyt includes some very useful apps. For example, there are apps available that display weather conditions and forecasts from the national weather service, AccuWeather, from a WeatherFlow Tempest Smart Weather System (see the article I wrote on the Tempest here), and other sources of weather information.
Tydbit displays air quality information from AirNow.gov, the pollen count in your area, and data from a PurpleAir outdoor air quality monitor (see the article I wrote on the PurpleAir here).
Tydbit displays news feeds from the BBC, ESPN, Wall Steet Journal, Fox, CNN, Guardian, Verge, and many more news services. It also includes travel information related to traffic, flights, various mass transit systems, and bike sharing services, as well as stock prices and crypto prices, scores for your favorite teams, and work-related information, including Google calendar entries, Outlook calendar entries, and MS Teams status.
All of these apps make the Tidbyt a very useful addition to any home or office. You may find yourself buying more than one so that each can be customized with different apps depending on the room where the device is located.
Integrating the Tidbyt with a Smart Home? Not So Fast
If all the apps available for the Tidbyt are not enough, the open architecture of the device allows people with software development skills to create their own apps.
For this article, I created a simple app that displays data from a Crestron smart home processor. The app is simple. It just takes the status of a heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system integrated with a Crestron processor and displays it on a Tidbyt.
Tidbyt applications are written in a Python-like language called Pixlet. Information on the language, tools, applications programming interface (API), and more can be found here. My completed app required only 16 lines of Pixlet code. It, along with the server code for the Crestron processor that responds to the requests from the Pixlet code, can be downloaded from my GitHub here.
I fully debugged my app using the simulator that Tidbyt provides for testing. However, when you undertake work with a new product and a new development environment, it is like unpeeling the layers of an onion. You start by learning the basics and as you progress you learn more and more about a product. After testing my code with Tidbyt’s simulator, I wanted to test it with a real Tidbyt. It was at this point that I learned that apps weren’t loaded onto the Tidbyt itself. Instead, apps run in the Tidbyt cloud and just the information to render the output of the apps on the Tidbyt display was transmitted from the Tidbyt cloud to the individual device. This meant that it was impossible for my app to communicate with my Crestron processor without a port forward being setup on my router. In this day and age, port forwards are a significant security risk and would open my network to hackers.
This means that the current Tidbyt architecture makes it impossible for the device to interface with a smart home or IoT device located inside a homeowner’s network and not in the cloud. Needless to say, this was a significant disappointment for me.
Areas for Improvement
First, and foremost I think that Tidbyt needs to extend their architecture to provide for integration with a smart home. They have announced the first steps of this with their plans to integrate with Home Assistant (release of this features is planned for early 2025).
I would hope that this integration is open and done in a way to facilitate the integration with other smart home platforms besides Home Assistant. Many smart home platforms have communities of software developers that are willing to donate their time to provide the community with enhancements to the platform. If Tidbyt provides an open API for smart home integration, I expect they will have many other platforms besides Home Assistant integrated with the Tidbyt in a short period of time.
Second, I believe that Tidbyt needs to move beyond Google Home integration and integrate with Amazon Alexa. According to statista, Google Home has a 24% market share of the smart speaker market while the Amazon Echo has a 64% market share. This makes the choice to integrate with Google Home first somewhat confusing to me (as does the decision to integrate the Tidbyt with Home Assistant when SmartThings has a much larger market share). By choosing to implement with platforms with the largest market shares first, Tidbyt has the best chance of growing its user base more quickly, providing funding for additional product enhancements, and allowing larger scale production to lower costs.
Summary and Conclusions
In spite of the current challenges of integrating a Tidbyt with a smart home, the Tidbyt is a useful and relatively inexpensive purchase. Its simple design hides the power of what it provides in functionality and convenience. If the planned integration with Home Assistant is implemented in a way that provides an easy-to-use foundation for integration with other smart home platforms, the Tidbyt may become a staple in many smart homes.
