Embedded Development for Smart Home
INDUSTRY
IoT
CLIENT
Home Automation
Home Automation: Embedded Development for Smart Home
"A team extension at Waverley developed embedded software for security panels and voice communication and built a hybrid mobile app for remote control."
Waverley has spent more than a year as the embedded engineering partner for a confidential smart-security company modernizing its home security systems into a connected smart-home platform. What started as a single front-end team building a mobile app for remote monitoring grew into a multi-discipline mandate covering Android development, server-side engineering, security-panel firmware, and QA across the client's full product line.
Waverley replaced an aging Flash-based control app, which did not run on iOS and performed poorly on Android, with a fast, cross-platform hybrid app built on an early AngularJS framework. The team also engineered a custom HD video player for the client's security cameras and wrote the 3G-communicator firmware that brought modern connectivity and two-way voice to legacy GE and Honeywell security panels already installed in customers' homes.
Home Automation
Our client is an industry-leading company turning traditional security systems into smart-home solutions. Its platform lets homeowners remotely monitor and control security, heating, and electricity from a single app, spanning door locks, HD security cameras, and environmental sensors alongside the security panel itself.
As the client's device ecosystem grew, it needed an offshore software engineering partner with genuine mobile and embedded experience, one that could work across firmware, mobile, and server-side code at once, and scale alongside the business as its product line expanded. That need brought the client to Waverley.
Project Analysis and Challenges
When Waverley joined the project, the client's home-control app was built on Flash. Flash did not run on iOS at all and performed slowly on Android, which meant the client could not fully serve a large and growing share of smartphone owners. Modernizing that single app defined the starting scope of the engagement, but three deeper technical constraints shaped how the rebuild actually had to be built.
First, the client's security cameras needed live and recorded HD video inside the app, and standard HTML5 video streaming only worked reliably in a handful of browsers, so a generic web video player was not an option. Second, the same interface had to run identically on phones, tablets, and in-wall touchscreen panels, many of them low-cost Android hardware with limited processing power, which put a hard ceiling on how much a JavaScript-based UI could do before it felt sluggish. Third, the client's existing security panels, GE and Honeywell hardware already installed in customers' homes, could only reach the cloud over GSM; extending that hardware to 3G connectivity and adding features like two-way voice meant writing new firmware for panels Waverley had not designed.
Together, these constraints ruled out an off-the-shelf rebuild. The client needed a genuinely cross-platform front end, a purpose-built video component, and embedded firmware work that treated the existing installed hardware base as fixed, not something to replace.
Waverley Solution
Waverley and the client's in-house team worked side by side to rebuild the application and extend the panel firmware, with Waverley's mandate growing over time from a small, front-end-focused team into full-stack, firmware, and QA coverage.
What We Delivered
Built a hybrid mobile app for iOS and Android, plus a matching touchscreen panel interface, integrating security and energy management into one experience alongside the client's in-house developers.
Re-architected the UI on an early AngularJS framework, combining canvas-based UI controls for performance with the development speed of standard UI elements, which simplified how the interface could evolve afterward.
Built a custom Android wrapper around the JavaScript application and tuned performance specifically for low-cost Android touchscreen hardware, since the client's device budget ruled out anything more powerful.
Engineered a custom video player, since off-the-shelf HTML5 streaming did not work consistently across browsers, adding clip-history navigation and pinch-to-zoom so users could review footage in detail on small screens.
Integrated support for the client's latest HD security cameras.
Wrote new 3G-communicator firmware for GE SimonXT (XTi), Honeywell Vista, and Honeywell Lynx 3000 panels, upgrading them beyond GSM-only connectivity and adding two-way, over-the-air voice communication and remote panel-settings management for the GE Simon XT and XTi models.
Adopted a microservices architecture to support the client's growing device ecosystem, including locks, cameras, and door and fire sensors.
How It Works: Quality Engineering
Waverley's QA team runs the engagement's testing program in Qmetry, covering regression testing across iOS, Android, Web, and the REST API; functional testing across each security-panel model; load testing; and smoke testing. Every defect is logged and tracked in Jira, and a weekly sync between the client's QA lead and Waverley's QA team keeps open issues moving.
Waverley also built a hardware-in-the-loop automated testing framework for the physical security panels: test cases are written in Java, Arduino boards automate interaction with the panel hardware itself, and Selenium WebDriver automates the corresponding web-client actions, with automated smoke tests layered on top.
Technology Overview
Outcomes & Impact
Platform reach: One hybrid app replaced a Flash-based predecessor that did not run on iOS and was slow on Android, unifying iOS, Android, touchscreen panels, and browser in a single codebase
Legacy hardware modernized: 3 legacy security-panel models (GE SimonXT/XTi, Honeywell Vista, Honeywell Lynx 3000) upgraded from GSM-only to 3G connectivity, with two-way voice added for GE Simon XT and XTi
Engagement growth: Team mandate expanded within one year from front-end development alone to Android, server-side engineering, new-product firmware, and multi-product QA
Partnership length: Engagement has continued to grow over time, with Waverley now supporting server-side and QA work across the client's product line
The rebuilt app gave the client one fast interface that worked everywhere its customers needed it, on phones, tablets, and the touchscreen panels installed in their homes, closing the iOS gap the Flash-based app could never close. On the hardware side, the 3G firmware and two-way voice capability extended the useful life of security panels already in the field, letting the client modernize service without a wholesale hardware replacement.
It is the pace and reliability of that delivery that turned a single front-end engagement into a broader, ongoing technical partnership: within one year, Waverley's role expanded to include Android development, server-side engineering, firmware for a new product line, and QA across multiple products.
Conclusion
This engagement shows what a Waverley team extension looks like when the work spans layers that do not usually sit under one roof: embedded firmware for hardware Waverley did not design, a cross-platform mobile and touchscreen application, and the QA discipline needed to keep both moving together. That range, and the trust it built over a year of expanding scope, is what let a confidential smart-security company treat Waverley as an engineering partner rather than a single-project vendor.
If your product spans firmware, mobile, and cloud, and you need a team that can move fluidly across all three, talk to Waverley about your own connected-hardware or smart-home initiative.
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