JointBox is a start-up business created to fill in the niche for open and modular hardware for home automation and smart homes. We help DIY community build better home automation solutions to last, and help build them faster.
Founders
True engineer. Enjoys tinkering, building stuff both hardware and software, helping others with engineering tasks. Dmitry spend his last 10 years in software consulting services, going through various positions in engineering and engineering management.
Dmitry has a very strong preference towards solid and neat solutions anywhere. Dmitry’s ‘prototypes’ oftentimes look better than Alex’s ‘production-ready devices’.
Business and engineering mixture. Enjoys building teams, companies, talking to people and bringing them value.
Alex spent his last 10 years also in a mix of engineering and management roles, but also touched upon things like marketing and sales. Alex can find common language with different people easily.
Logicify
Logicify was a previous business started by Alex. Dmitry joined initially as an employee, but became a partner shortly in. Logicify started as a software services consluting company and in 10 years grew organically from two people to 40 before sold to a larger consulting company in 2019. It was in many ways a lifestyle business, and an amazing learning journey for all the partners.
JointBox Backstory
Jointbox started as a solution to our very own problems in home automation.
Back in 2018 Dmitry started to build his dream home in Kherson, Ukraine. Being a true engineer, Dmitry wanted to build in as much home automation and smart features as possible. It turned out, however, that there were no single solution to fill in the needs! This was really strange - in 2018 the home automation and smart stuff market was already quite developed and diverse with many solutions readily available.
Dmitry had a strong vision on what is important - first and foremost wired approach, openness, direct control over hardware and software, no 3rd party clouds, full integration and so on. This then evolved into a JointBox Smart Home Principles (link), and propagated down to many aspects of the product and company, such as hardware design approach.
It turned out there was not a single product fitting the bill well! Most of the makers went with the cloud, radio-controlled, app-managed approach. However, there were already connected microcontroller platorms such as ESP8266, and ESP32, and high-level integration software like HomeAssistant, and firmwares like Tasmota, ESP Easy and similar (ESPHome replaced all these).
Dmitry started to build his own hardware for the smart home.
As this journey went on, Alex joined Dmitry on this route. Alex was also planning an apartment renovation and got all excited about the home automation. Alex and Dmitry back then were running Logicify, a software services company based in Kherson.
Prototypes were build, concepts were refined, all this happened on the base of the home Dmitry already lived in - and slowly it morphed into JointBox Hardware we see now: a set of modular hardware for the switchboard, low-voltage, extensible, and simple, and a few multi-functional sensor and remote room units. It turned out that there are other people who share same demands and thus a possible business opportunity.
In 2019, Dmitry and Alex decided to embark on startup journey, and sold Logicify. After the transfer period ended in 2021 JointBox took off at full speed.
Fast forward to 2022, there is a lot of stuff to do. We already have working devices, but bringing them to the customer takes a lot of efforts - from improving designs to launching new marketing and setting up production scale in accordance with demand.
It is an interesting and challenging journey, and we are happy to be adding to the Open solutions out there for the community benefit. We hope JointBox would become the part of solution to build better connected and automated homes in an ethical way.
Smart Home Principles
We have created the hardware as a solution to our own problem. Hardware design, product positioning and even the company itself is based on the following vision of the home automation solutions:
Local connections, local data storage, local processing. Your home should be a safe place and no extra data about it and your life should go outside.
Wireless is awesome for after-market installations, but nothing beats a good old wire running to a switch. Wireless can degrade while scaling, and something it can degrade because of external factors like a neighbor switching to your channel.
so that you are in control
Smart features should degrade gradually and reasonably. Broken internet uplink (or worse server) is never a good excuse for light not switching on in the bathroom.
If you have 30 lights in your home controlled via automation and 2 which are not, you still have to get off the couch to switch it off, which kills the idea. The automation has to be complete.
You have entire power of HomeAssistant to build extended integrations across multiple devices. Like adding simple battery-powered smart buttons to control light scenarios next to your couch where wiring is absent.
The hardware should be reasonably priced
You should not sacrifice visual design to install those specific smart switches. Wired smart home works with any pushbuttons installed as light switches, available from all the makers.