Former Mozilla employees come up with privacy-friendly smarthome hub

Silk Labs, a company founded by former Firefox OS team members, is launching an internet-of-things camera to act as a test bed for a new iot platform, “Silk.” Silk Labs has christened the camera ‘Sense’.

The goal of marketing Sense is to build a secure iot operating system. Sense is therefore the first hub that works with Silk. The design of both Sense and Silk will eventually become open source.

Other devices can connect to the Sense camera-cum-hub and ensure that it is clear what is happening via the platform. The device thus forms the central link in the platform and is therefore more than a stand-alone security camera that reacts to movement, for example. Through facial recognition, Sense knows who enters the house and can respond to it. For example, the hub can set a linked thermostat to a desired temperature and turn on the person’s favorite music. The device can also recognize pets.

Sense’s hardware is not very special. The device measures 4.7×13.1×5.4cm and uses an ARM CPU with six cores and an undisclosed ‘high performance’ GPU, 2GB RAM and 16GB flash memory, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth low energy and an accelerometer. The device also includes a status light, a 1080p wide-angle camera, infrared LEDs for night vision, a microphone and speakers.

All information that the device collects is processed locally. The machine learning side also happens on the device. What is sent out should not be visible to ‘people who are not in possession’ of their own Sense device or the paired smartphone.

Sense currently works with Philips Hue, LIFX, Sonos and Nest, but this number is expected to expand quickly because the SDK is open and “anyone who can write javascript” can develop an application for Silk. Silk is built on Node.js.