Brillant Tech Light Switch, Could be Better / Cheaper with e-Ink

It could be Truly Brilliant

Once a person comprehends even the most basic idea of what this could be, it becomes a true "Ah Ha!" moment.  The utility that a small touch screen with color has is quite a wide range of capabilities, including visual concepts, color queues.  It is far more than just a light switch it is a portal to the rest of the SmartHome. The switch can control music, lights, communications between family members, keep tabs on young children, etc.  But the buy-in is just a tad bit too high. 

Old School

The Wink Relay was one of the first small-form-factor devices to do the roughly the same thing as the Brilliant Switch. It had all the same controls, but lacked the back-end connectivity to tools like Alexa and Google Home.  Wink had a good idea, but like the Brilliant Switch, its price of $300 was just a bit more than most were willing to spend.  Albeit, it is quite possible to spend $2000 on SmartHome devices, but that should be the total for at least a dozen devices, not half that.

A Good Solution with e-Ink

While Brilliant is quite intelligent in the approach to providing access to SmartHome capabilities in a more stationary and available manner.  The up-front cost of purchase and then the concern for energy use in the future is to use an e-Ink screen touchscreen rather than a full color.  Granted, the device would no longer be usable as a video chat tool, but I'm sure many people would be much happier to pay one-third to one-quarter of the price and lose that feature. 

The advantage of e-Ink comes in the fact that the screen only uses power to change states.  You can see this in many consumer stores, like Best Buy or Kohls, where most of the prices are in e-Ink.  Each module is battery op and the prices can be changed from a smartphone, rather than printed out new each time on paper. 

Cost Projections

Without a good idea of the cost, I can only speculate.  Using the e-ink / e-paper display sold on SparkFun and Adafruit sites as a reference, I suspect that the switch could be priced around $50 each, to start.  And after 1.000,000 units sold, possibly as low as $25?

No Conclusion

There's no way of knowing, but I hope that Aaron Emigh (the CEO of Brilliant) sees this post or at least has already pondered the possibility of using e-Ink / e-Paper to offer a project that is similar in the future.  As it stands now, his company may be rolling with the idea to sell the Top end model first to then bank roll the lesser cost product later.