According to a Statista report, the number of smart homes is projected to soar past 400 million in 2024 and double to almost 800 million users by 2028. This surge in adoption will increase the sales of smart home devices, and a key one in this list is the touchscreen control panel.
While it is costlier than downloading an app for remote control, these smart home touchscreen control panels have additional features like multiple interfaces and built-in gateways. They are also easier to integrate with different smart home brands, so you won’t need to deploy different apps on your customer’s smartphone to control the devices.
In this article, I’ll recommend the best SoC to use when building smart home touchscreen control panels, plus three other alternatives that are worth considering. Let’s get started!
What Is a Smart Home Control Panel?
A smart home control panel is basically a specialized smart device that resembles a tablet, which you mount on a wall to control smart home devices or peripherals. Naturally, you’d think this panel provides an interface for connecting to other smart home appliances for direct control without using a smartphone, and this is true. However, a smart home control panel also provides an interface for the user’s smartphone to connect to for remote control, giving you the best of both worlds.
So in a smart home architecture that incorporates such a control panel, this specialized tablet doubles up as the hub or gateway because all the end nodes connect to it. The device also packs in the required computing power to run the IoT network of sensors (end devices). It can also connect to the cloud to send data for analytics.
So in addition to having more features than an app, a smart home touchscreen control panel can:
- Provide intelligent voice recognition for hands-free interaction
- Have an intuitive display to show the operating status of various connected home appliances for easy use
- Pull content from the cloud (music, recipes, news, weather, etc.) to enhance the customer experience
Therefore, this panel is not an alternative to a smart home mobile app. Instead, it is a gateway with a touchscreen that gives users direct control over the devices and automation rules in the network.
Examples of Smart Touch Panels for Home Automation
Some ready-made smart touch panels you can use for home automation include the following.
DSGW-120 Smart Home Control Panel with Touch Screen
This all-in-one smart home control panel features an 8-inch IPS touchscreen to provide the UI, a 5MP camera to run a video system for the security aspect of the smart home, and a 1,500 mAh lithium battery backup to run the system in case of an outage.
Behind the scenes is a low-power, high-performance, quad-core PX30 SoC (Cortex-A35 quad-core CPU), which can run Linux and Android, plus automation rules for the smart home.
Other notable features include multi-protocol support (ZigBee, BLE, WiFi, LTE, Ethernet, and RS485) to run and control a myriad of smart home devices, a built-in microphone plus speaker to power the voice command function, and easy wall mounting installation. Overall, this device provides an open hardware platform for integrating all kinds of home security and automation functions.
DSGW-130 Zigbee Touch Screen Control Panel
Compared to the DSGW-120, this touchscreen control panel has a smaller 4-inch IPS display, but its compact size (86mm x 86mm) makes it easy to fit in a junction box; you can swap it with a regular wall switch for installation.
Despite its compact size, this multifunctional IoT gateway supports intelligent scene linkage, interconnecting the end nodes to enhance the user experience. One example is when a user walks into the house and locks the smart door lock. With scene linkage configured, this panel can automatically trigger the entryway light to turn on.
The panel also supports various protocols, including ZigBee, WiFi, Ethernet, and RS485 to run multiple smart home devices, while two built-in microphones and one speaker enable voice control.
It has the same PX30 SoC as the DSGW-120 so you can expect similar performance in a compact and cheaper package.
SoC Requirement to Develop Smart Home Touch Panel
From these two smart home touchscreen control panel options, it is clear that the brains behind it or SoC should provide at least these four requirements to run the system smoothly.
- Run RTOS, Linux, or Android operating systems, depending on the device’s specifications or requirements
- Support various mainstream UI frameworks to power the display or UI
- Provide a multimedia dev kit to handle audio and video playback
- Support online and offline voice control and easily adapt to third-party mainstream audio algorithms
Introducing Rockchip SoCs for Developing Smart Home Control Panels
The most suitable SoC I recommend to use for this project is the RK3308, which has a quad-core Cortex-A35 64-bit CPU that delivers high performance and low power consumption.
Compared to the Cortex A7, this SoC consumes 10% less power and performs better in these three areas.
- Shaping performance (6% higher)
- Floating point performance (36% higher)
- Overall performance (40% higher)
This SoC also provides high integration, which reduces the BoM cost for interconnecting supporting hardware for the control panel. Some of the interfaces include:
- USB 2.0 OTG
- USB 2.0 HOST
- I2C
- UART
- PWM
- Codec (mic)
- Codec lineout (speaker)
On video output, RK3308 supports 720p (30FPS) video playback using RGB or SPI screen interfaces as two independent layers, MJPEG and H.264 decoder types, RTSP video streaming playback, and the Rockit API for customized development.
The SoC also runs LVGL (Light and Versatile Graphics Library) as the mainstream display framework to build lightweight and intuitive UIs. It supports a rich software ecosystem (Linux, RTOS, AMP, and bare metal) as well.
If you decide to use RTOS to run the touchscreen control panel, the RK3308 supports RT-Thread 4.1 system (multicore) to run the IoT network, Little VGL as the display framework, and provides a quick 1-second boot time to the main interface.
But with Linux, the boot time will take slightly longer, but less than 5 seconds overall, and this process involves:
- Loading the kernel to RAM
- Kernel subsystems and hardware devices initialization by the kernel
- Root file system mounting and init application starting by the kernel
- Starting applications and user-space services in the root file system
Although the RK3308 has a 64-bit core, it is backward compatible with 32-bit systems, and the difference between the two lies in memory consumption, context switching, and floating point performance.
RK3308 comes in 5 variants that have slightly different features.
- RK3308B: 1.3GHz max CPU frequency, 16-bit DDR2/3/3L or LPDDR2 with 512MB max memory capacity, and a -20°C–80°C working temperature range.
- RK3308H: Same as RK3308B but with embedded 64MB DDR2 RAM
- RK3308H1: Same as RK3308H but the embedded RAM is DDR3L with a capacity of 128MB
- RK3308H3: Same as RK3308H1 but the embedded DDR3L RAM has a 256MB capacity
- RK3308J: An industrial variant that has the same RAM as the RK3308B but with a 1GHz max CPU frequency and a broader operating temperature range (-45°C–85°C)
Each of these is suitable for a specific application, but the first one (RK3308B) is ideal for a smart home touchscreen tablet.
Other Rockchip SoCs You May Consider for Developing Touch Panels for Smart Homes
Besides the RK3308, you can use the RK3326, PX30, or RK3562 to develop this touch panel, with the first two being most similar to the RK3308 because they have the same quad-core Cortex-A35 CPU.
However, the RK3326 supports 1080p video codec, as well as LVDS, MIPI, SPI, and RGB interfaces for LCD screens, making it better for making advanced smart home touchscreen control panels. It features a highly energy-efficient GPU and RGA 2D graphics acceleration as well, plus it supports DVP and MIPI cameras, which makes it possible to double up the panel for the video intercom system.
The PX30 also supports 1080p video codec but only has two interfaces for LCD screens. However, it has multiple I2C, PWM, and UART interfaces to maximize peripheral connectivity.
But if you want to build a touch control panel with AI capabilities, I recommend the RK3562 because it has a 1 TOPS NPU that can handle lightweight inferencing. This SoC’s quad-core Cortex-A53 CPU is also faster (2GHz), and it can handle up to 4 camera feeds to enable two-way video communication with the persons outside.
Final Words
In conclusion, smart home touchscreen control panels are essential in modern smart home solutions and I highly recommend them if you want to develop all-in-one smart hubs with intercom-like security systems and easily customizable options directly on the device, such as scene personalization. The centralized control with UI on a large screen gives the user more convenient control over the connected devices, and the tablet is easier to integrate with different smart home brands.
As for the available solution options, you can either buy the ready-made smart home touchscreen control panels and deploy custom software on them, or use the four recommended SoCs to tailor-make the hardware to match your brand. If you’re good with hardware, the second option is better. Either way, Dusun provides technical support during the development process to help you get your solutions to market as quickly as possible.
Contact us today for a consultation about the best SoC to use when developing your smart home touchscreen control panels or to get started if you’ve already determined the one to use.
