Smart Home - Smart Appliances
In this project, a general purpose wireless controller hardware that controls the home appliances and various sensors, and a master controller software working on an embedded Linux installed board will be developed. Master controller will collect data, show data in a user friendly interface, let user send control commands to appliances, push data to web services if necessary, and also provide web based control of devices. Zigbee is possible wireless protocol to use. Master controller is developed on a Linux box – BeagleBoard.
Moreover, efficiency and usability of home automation systems will be simplified and designed in a generic manner. In order to apply “smart home” ideas to any house, certain requirements of electronic devices at home, light fixtures exist and they will probably cost much to renovate than “smart home” system devices themselves. Our system will be lowering the cost of these expenses. Network constituted of ZigBee compatible devices will serve as data medium, whereas PIC embedded devices with a collection of sensors will be responsible of collecting and reporting statistical data to master controller. Advantage of our approach from the ones in market is more general compatibility ability meaning that a more general communication protocol will be used to address much more devices to make our design more valuable. Also, master controller will possibly realize simple machine learning techniques to provide home the ability of learning efficiency strategies over time. In order to achieve this, we need to combine a more generic sensor collection, more than smart homes systems currently on the market. Additionally, we will work on a user friendly interface after finishing up the hardware part of the project.
Statistical data collected from end devices will be collected in master device and will be pushed to a web server for user friendly display and control of certain properties of those end devices. Local data storage in case of emergency and internet connection loss will be provided in Linux Box with certain limitations, as well.