Introduction

The smart home Designer is your tool for creating and editing smart home designs. You define the smart home solutions, features, and devices in each room of a home, and when you're ready, Devicebook will turn your design into a fully-functional smart home app automatically.

You are highly encouraged to watch the video below which is an overview of a smart home job, with an emphasis on creating the smart home design.

Starting a Smart Home Design

Smart Home designs are always created as part of a smart home job in Devicebook for Contractors. You can skip this section if you've already started a Job and created a new design.

1. Start a new Smart Home Job, if you haven't already.

A job can have as many designs as you'd like. Ultimately, you'll mark only one of them as the design "approved" by the client. That's the one Devicebook will use to generate the Home Controller.

 

2. Click "Create a Design". 

In the detail page for your smart home job, click the "Create a Design" button. Devicebook will start asking you for some information about this design.

 

3. Provide a name, and an optional description for this design.

The name and description are for your convenience only.

 

4. The flow will ask you for information about the rooms and locations in the home.

By default, Devicebook will suggest a layout of a home with common names of locations around a home. You can rename locations, remove locations, move locations between floors, and add new locations with the (+) button. Hover over buttons to see what they do.

You'll be able to change the locations in the home later, too.

 

5. Select the smart home solutions for this smart home.

Smart home solutions are packages of smart home features, bundled together to make it easy for you to design a smart home.

Select these solutions based on your discussions with your client, and your tour of their home. You'll be able to modify your selections later if needed.

Note that the smart home solutions listed here are the ones that you (or a company manager) chose to add to your company's My Showroom from the Devicebook Showroom.

When you complete this step of the flow, you'll be navigated to Devicebook's Smart Home Designer.

Navigation

Sidebar

The left-hand Sidebar is your navigation pane and guide. To design the smart home, you'll roughly start from the top and make your way down.

Navigation Sidebar tips:

• The back arrow in the top left will take you back to the Job's detail page.
• The gear icon in the top right of the navigation bar lets you change the design's name or description, House Info (locations), or the selected smart home solutions.
• The help icon is a link to this knowledge base.
• Below these basic controls, you'll see the name of your design and its description if you provided one.
• Below that is the client's name, the name of the property, and the client's email address.
• The main navigation section allows you to navigate between the main four steps of creating a design: Device & Feature Placement, Accessory & Network Planning, Design Summary/Review, and preparing a Quote.

Workspace

Everything in the big right-side pane in the Designer is the workspace. It shows you details about the navigation element you've selected in the Sidebar.

 

Designing the Smart Home

Process

In short, you'll be turning your client's requirements into a functional smart home design, one smart home solution at a time. In general, the process will look like this:

1. Choose a smart home solution. (E.g. Lighting)

2. Choose a room that should have the features of this smart home solution (E.g. Living Room).

3. Click the "Add Devices" button to be walked through a flow which will ask you for details about the devices and features that should be in this room of the smart home.

The instructions in the following sections will go into detail about how to do this.

4. Repeat steps 2 & 3 for every room that should have this smart home solution.

5. Repeat steps 1-4 for each smart home solution in the design.

Tip: Your changes to a design are always saved automatically.

 

Feature Selection & Device Placement

Start by selecting one of the smart home solutions you want to configure in the navigation bar, then select a location in the home that should have the features offered by the selected solution.

Select "Add Devices" to launch a wizard that will guide you through the steps to configure this smart home solution in this room. You'll be able to adjust these choices, and even reset your choices, later.

The devices that will appear in the wizard are chosen from your contracting company's My Showroom. Learn how to add more devices to My Showroom here: Get Started with Devicebook for Contractors.

Choosing Devices

The model of devices you choose to use in a smart home is very important. Different devices are reliable in different situations, based on their communication protocol, hardware specifications, and often simply their general quality.

Important: You should read through Devicebook's Device Selection Guide to learn about how to select the right device for each situation. 

When you complete the Add Devices flow, the changes will be applied to the room. If necessary down the road, you can swap out devices, add or remove optional features, or reset the room entirely if you want to start over. See the infographics below for more information on editing a room for a particular solution.

About the room view

Interacting with the room view. Tip: Click on the image to zoom in.

Remember: you do not have to add every solution to every room - just configure the solutions/rooms necessary to meet the client's needs.

Optional Features

You'll notice that some smart home solutions have "Optional Features". During the wizard, you'll be asked if you want to add any of these optional features to this room. For example, when you add Lighting to a room, Devicebook will ask you if you want to also add Motion-Based lighting or Illuminance-Based lighting. If you choose to skip adding these features during the wizard, you can still add them later by clicking the "Add Feature" button on the room's page.

Design Summary

Once you've finished choosing the features and devices in each room, for each smart home solution, check out the Design Summary to make sure everything looks as you expect. If everything looks good, you can move on to the Design Quote.

Design Quote

The Design Quote allows you to create a quote to send to the customer for billing. The Quote can be divided into three sections: Solution summaries, Total Device Summary, and Final Adjustments.

In each Solution summary, you can see the breakdown of devices used for that Solution, and the price for that Solution if it did not reuse any devices from other Solutions. This allows you to give the client a realistic view of what the costs are for each Solution independently.

The Total Device Summary shows all of the devices that are used in the solution. For devices that are reused across multiple solutions, you can see a breakdown showing how many devices are reused and how much money is saved by reusing those devices.

The Final Adjustments section allows you to make any final adjustments to the quote before sending it to the client. This includes: Adjustments for Labor/Accessories, Discount, and Estimated Tax. Changing any of those will automatically update the total.

Send the quote to the client with the Send Quote button. The Devicebook will immediately send an email with the quote details to the email on file for this client.