In 1930, during an international design exhibition organized in Monza, a group of young architects sponsored by Edison presented the “Casa Elettrica”, a rationalist house model, inspired by an idea by Gio Ponti, in which the lighting systems and appliances played a fundamental role in architecture. At the time of this ancestor of today's “smart” homes, however, vacuum cleaners, electric ovens and automatic coffee machines were still a rarity and the same houses equipped with electricity were very different from those of today.
With the first domestic electrical systems of the 1920s and 1930s, much less energy could be used and there were fewer lights and switches due to the considerable difficulties in installing electrical wires and sockets. It was only after the Second World War that things changed: at the end of the 1940s the invention of the relay greatly simplified the structure of electrical systems in homes. In 1949 the Turin-based Piero Giordanino, in fact, patented the modern step-by-step relay, a small device destined to simplify the lives of millions of people, in Italy and in the world. Without too many technical details, it serves to connect several switches and thus to control the lighting of a room from different points. In the first domestic electrical systems it could not be done: there was a single switch for each light.
In 1954 Giordanino founded Finder, a company specializing in the production of electronic and electromechanical components which, over time, began to be distributed worldwide. Today this Italian company has, in fact, 26 offices around the world and continues to produce innovative devices. The relay, for example, has recently been “updated” in a multifunction and Bluetooth version to become the center of an innovative system to make domestic systems even simpler, the YESLY system.
YESLY, presented by Finder in 2018, is a “comfort-living” system: as you can imagine, it is designed to make some daily activities more comfortable. It allows you to make homes “smart” in a few simple steps: a multifunction Bluetooth relay and a smartphone app are enough to control the lights and electric shutters of your home. The integration of YESLY with the voice assistants of Amazon and Google also makes it possible to voice control to turn lights on or off, raise or lower the blinds. A peculiarity of the system, which distinguishes it from the more complex home automation systems, is that it does not require invasive renovation works: for the installation and configuration of the YESLY devices it is, in fact, sufficient to contact your electrician and no major works are required.
Overall, YESLY consists of seven devices, to be chosen according to your needs. In addition to the multifunction relay, there is for example BEYON, a wireless button that connects to the system via Bluetooth and can be kept in every room of the house. Powered by an energy harvesting process, Beyon does not need batteries or chargers: it works, in fact, thanks to the kinetic energy generated when the button is pressed.
Other YESLY accessories are the range extender, useful for increasing the range of the system and making it suitable for homes of all sizes, and the input interface, a device capable of making any home switch “smart”, transforming it into a wireless control. The system is even more convenient if you also install the gateway and connect it to the home WiFi network: it allows you to control everything even remotely and then turn the lights off or on, raise or lower the shutters, even when you are in the office or at the supermarket. Also thanks to the gateway, the YESLY system can be controlled by voice, thanks to the integration with the Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa voice assistants, even without owning Google Home or Amazon Echo.
Finally, the YESLY system allows the creation of customized “scenarios”, that is, to manage different lights and shutters at the same time according to needs and situations.
When designing YESLY, Finder took the security of personal data very seriously. All YESLY devices communicate with each other with a secure connection with TLS (Transport Layer Standard) based on 128-bit end-to-end encryption: it makes data in transit between devices unintelligible, making them inaccessible in case of intrusion. The presence of the Gateway between WiFi routers and YESLY devices also acts as a further defense against any cyber attacks. Finally, all data managed by the system is encrypted, not available to third parties and stored in the cloud, in compliance with the European Privacy Regulation.
Where you can buy YESLY devices
On the YESLY website, on the home page, you can try the experience of controlling lights and shutters with a simulation, both in desktop version and in mobile version. To purchase the various products of the system, on the other hand, you can visit the “Where to buy” section to find the dealer closest to your city or a YESLY point.
