IEEE International Conference on Advances in Engineering & Technology Research (ICAETR - 2014),

August 01-02, 2014, Dr. Virendra Swarup Group of Institutions, Unnao, India

REMOTELY CONTROLLED HOME AUTOMATION SYSTEM

Nikhil Singh, Shambhu Shankar Bharti, Rupal Singh, Dushyant Kumar Singh1
1 Assistant Professor, Dept of CSE, MNNIT Allahabad

ABSTRACT: This paper describes an investigation into the regularly check for appliances running uselessly, and
potential for remote controlled operation of home automation switch them off.
systems. It considers problems with their implementation,
discusses possible solutions through various network At this point of environment turmoil, Wi-Fi
technologies and indicates how to optimize the use of such based home automation [2] comes to our rescue. It offers
systems. The home is an eternal, heterogeneous, distributed the user complete access control of the appliances through
computing environment (Greaves, 2002) which certainly
a remote interface. In this way, even if you’re already on
requires a careful study before developing any suitable Home
Automation System (HAS) that will accomplish its your way to office after locking the house, you can still
requirements. Nevertheless the latest attempts at introducing check the status of your appliances and turn them on or
Home Automation Systems [1] in actual homes for all kinds of off. Automation is the use of control systems and
users are starting to be successful thanks to the continuous information technology to control equipment, industrial
standardization process that is lowering the prices and making machinery and processes, reducing the need for the
devices more useful and easier to use for the end user. Even so human intervention.
several important issues are always to be handled strictly before
developing and installing a Home Automation System; factors In the scope of industrialization, automation is a
like security, reliability, usefulness, robustness and price are step beyond mechanization. Mechanization provided
critical to determine if the final product will accomplish the human operators with machinery to assist them with the
expected requirements.
requirements of work while automation greatly reduces
KEYWORDS – Home Automation System, Microcontroller,
the need for human sensory and mental requirements as
Android, Server. well. Automation plays an increasingly important role in
the global economy and in daily experience. Engineers
strive to combine automated devices with mathematical
and organizational tools to create complex systems for a
1. INTRODUCTION
rapidly expanding range of applications and human
We are in an age where we have too much work but lesser activities. Many roles for human in industrial process
time, quite a lot of responsibilities but an equal proportion presently lie beyond the scope of automation. Automation
of emergencies to leave them unattended. A major one of has a notable impact in a wide range of highly visible
those “unattended” responsibilities is our duty towards industries beyond manufacturing.
future generations and save power. Sitting in our room
with the air conditioner on, we get an urgent call, and we 2. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
leave the room at once, with the appliances unattended
and still running. The paper presents an architecture which uses an android
phone, a laptop (computer), a microcontroller, and a
A 1kW AC will consume 1 kWh of energy, switching circuit. The android phone is used to run the
equal to 3.6 million joules. This magnitude of energy is designed application to control the appliance. The Laptop
approximately equal to the energy released by explosive acts as a server, communicating the commands to the
of 857.14 grams of TNT. Within that one hour, around microcontroller, which in turn, switches the relay, turning
1.05 kg of CO2 would be produced. If the same AC is left on or off the desired appliance. Additionally, the request
open like this for each day in a 30-day month, imagine the to turn a device on/off can also be given through web
consequences. The energy produced would be sufficient interface, which communicates with the server Laptop
to land a 95-tonne aircraft at typical landing speed. directly. The Fig 1 explains this network of remote
Additionally, it will incur an extra cost of Rs 200 at just 1 appliances.
hour run per day. All this data is just for a single AC
running for one hour per day in a month. Imagine how All devices are remotely controlled by PC which is
much energy is wasted by the entire home appliances connected through the port to microcontroller. LCD
combined, running for the hours in a day with no use. screen used to display the current status of home
Sadly, our lives have been running in such a pace that it is appliances. Motion sensor used for counting number of
almost impossible to keep track of running lights, people inside the home. The brief description of the
components is as follows-

978-1-4799-6393-5/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE

 IEEE International Conference on Advances in Engineering & Technology Research (ICAETR - 2014),
August 01-02, 2014, Dr. Virendra Swarup Group of Institutions, Unnao, India

A. MICROCONTROLLER
i. Principle
The microcontroller IC [3] is actually the ATmega16 IC
having 16 kb of flash memory. This device receives the The circuit works on the principle of switching operation
serial request from the laptop, interprets it and transfers of the transistor. The transistor operates in the saturation
the request to the corresponding relay switching circuit. and the cut-off region for this operation. Thus, it works on
This device is programmed in Embedded C programming two points on the load line of the V-I characteristics.
language using Code Vision AVR. Upon receiving the When base current is zero, it acts as open switch (cut-off)
request from the server, the USART interrupt service and when base current acquires a threshold value it acts as
routine is called, request is read and interpreted in this closed switch (saturation).
service routine, and the program moves back to initial
state, ready to receive further requests. ii. Working
When a particular pin of microcontroller goes high, a +5V
is applied on the base of the transistor. This induces the
flow of base current thereby driving the transistor from
cut-off into saturation and it acts as closed switch. Thus a
+12V Dc voltage is applied across the relay coils which
triggers (turns on) the relay and in turn the relay circuit
gets closed and the pins P2 and P5 are shorted thereby
applying the +220V AC supply across the device and the
device turns on.

C. LAPTOP SERVER
The Laptop acts as a server which takes input from
remote server and android mobile and in turn directs the
microcontroller to control various home appliances. This
server is always kept on so that the devices inside the
house can always be controlled from far away locations
and also wirelessly through mobile phone. The server
Fig1. Control Flow receives request from either the phone through Wi-Fi or
through internet to turn on or off a particular appliance.

B. RELAY BASED CIRCUIT

D. ANDROID MOBILE
This is the actual circuit that is operated upon by the
The Android application [4] is our attempt to make the
microcontroller IC, giving remote access to appliances
user appliance interaction seamless and effortless. The
turning them on and off. Fig 2 gives its explicit working
application is highly flexible and can pertain to all house
details.
or office needs or design types, and can list any number of
devices in any fashion. IT shows their current state as
well as allows the user to change the state of the
appliance. The range is fair, limited by the Wi-Fi range.
Android is open source and Google releases the code
under the Apache License. This open source code and
permissive licensing allows the software to be freely
modified and distributed by device manufacturers,
wireless carriers and enthusiast developers. Additionally,
Android has a large community of developers writing
applications ("apps") that extend the functionality of
devices, written primarily in a customized version of the
Java programming language. Android's open nature has
further encouraged a large community of developers and
enthusiasts to use the open source code as a foundation
for community-driven projects, which add new features
for advanced users or bring Android to devices which
Fig 2: RELAY BASED CIRCUIT were officially released running other OS.

978-1-4799-6393-5/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE

 IEEE International Conference on Advances in Engineering & Technology Research (ICAETR - 2014),
August 01-02, 2014, Dr. Virendra Swarup Group of Institutions, Unnao, India

3. SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION defined as data communication equipment). It is

commonly used in computer serial ports. The standard
This chapter will discuss about the design of home defines the electrical characteristics and timing of signals,
automation system. Our design consist a light bulb, a the meaning of signals, and the physical size and pinout
motion sensor and a fan. The bulb and the fan are of connectors.
connected through a relay based circuit to microcontroller
and the motion sensor is directly connected with C. SIMULATORS
microcontroller. Fig 3 gives the block diagram for the
design. All devices are remotely controlled by PC which 1. Tera Term: Tera Term (rarely TeraTerm) is an open-
is connected through the port to microcontroller. LCD source, free, software implemented, terminal emulator
screen used to display the current status of home (communications) program. It emulates different types of
appliances. Motion sensor used for counting number of computer terminals, from DEC VT100 to DEC VT382. It
people inside the home. supports telnet, SSH 1 & 2 and serial port connections. It
also has a built-in macro scripting language (supporting
A. ATMEGA 16 MICOCONTROLLER Oniguruma regular expressions) and a few other useful
plugins.
The ATmega16 is a low-power CMOS 8-bit
microcontroller based on the AVR enhanced RISC 2. Proteus Design Suite: Proteus is software for
architecture. By executing powerful instructions in a microprocessor simulation, schematic capture, and printed
single clock cycle, the ATmega16 achieves throughputs circuit board (PCB) design. It is developed by Labcenter
approaching 1 MIPS per MHz allowing the system Electronics. One of the main features of Proteus is the
designer to optimize power consumption versus Virtual System Modelling (VSM) that combines mixed
processing speed. mode SPICE circuit simulation, animated components
and microprocessor models to facilitate co-simulation of
complete microcontroller based designs.

3. Code Vision AVR: CodeVision AVR is an Integrated

Development Environment for programming the Atmel
AVR Series of Microchips. CodeVisionAVR features an
Automatic Program Generator (CodeWizardAVR) for the
new XMEGA devices. Fully dockable windows that allow
flexible customization of user’s workspace. This is a
redesigned split file pane editor allows viewing/editing
two files at the same time.

4. VSPE (Virtual Serial Port Emulator): Serial port

emulation is useful especially when there is a lack of
available physical serial ports. Communication between
software and/or devices which would otherwise require
extra physical connections can be benefited by using a
virtual COM Port emulator. Virtual serial ports lets you
send or receive data over a TCP/IP port using any serial
communication program. Using serial port emulation one
can split a real COM port between a numbers of virtual
serial ports. This makes it possible to supply data from a
single serial device to a number of different applications.

Fig 3: System Design

D. MOBILE PHONE APPLICATION

A perfect way of implementing user-appliance interface

B. SERIAL PORT seamlessly is through the PL Home Automation app,
developed by us. The application lists all the rooms and
RS-232 is the traditional name for a series of standards for
appliances and shows their current state, including the
serial binary single-ended data and control signals
options to turn them on and off. Home Automation app
connecting between DTE (data terminal equipment) and
opens with a basic layout for the home or office, which is
DCE (data circuit-terminating equipment, originally
changeable and highly flexible. The application has been
978-1-4799-6393-5/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE
 IEEE International Conference on Advances in Engineering & Technology Research (ICAETR - 2014),
August 01-02, 2014, Dr. Virendra Swarup Group of Institutions, Unnao, India

programmed using the Eclipse Helios editor. Fig 4 gives

the android interface. F. HOME CIRCUIT

The program is designed such that if no one is at home

then all home appliances automatically switched off. For
designed purpose we have used Proteus Design Suite. The
design consist a simple home automation design having a
“motion sensor” for counting number of people inside
home, “a speed controlled fan” ,”a light bulb”, ”a LCD”
for displaying status of home appliances. “a
microcontroller ic” for controlling devices “a port” for
connection purpose.

G. INTEGRATION OF HOME CIRCUIT WITH

ANDROID APPLICATION AND ONLINE
INTERFACE

The server receives on/off request (for fan speed of fan

request) for controlling various household appliances.
This server receives signal through android application
and online interface. With the help of this signal, the
Python script located on the server gets activated and the
script sends request to the serial port attached to the
Fig 4: Android Interface microcontroller. The microcontroller is coded in such a
way that when it gets signal from the port, it controls the
E. ONLINE INTERFACE/ADMIN PANEL corresponding home appliance attached to it.

Another way of controlling the appliances is through the The Python script contains two variables, “on_off” for
admin panel online. Apart from mere control on devices, identifying the appliance(e.g f for fan,b for bulb) and
the admin panel has variety of other powers. Here it can “object” for controlling it(e.g 0 for off, 1 for on in case of
also be specified which mobile device can control the bulb; in case of fan 0,1,2,3 for off, low, medium, high
appliances through the PL Automation app. The unique speed respectively). This script receives the values of
device ID gets integrated with the server for security, these variables “on_off” and “object” from the android
ensuring no other device can get access to appliances. application or online interface. This script uses these
You can add multiple devices, and revoke access for values to send corresponding values to the port which in
existing ones. turn forwards it to the microcontroller.

The microcontroller consists of several pins. When a

particular pin of microcontroller goes high, a +5V is
applied on the base of the transistor. This induces the flow
of base current thereby driving the transistor from cut-off
into saturation and it acts as closed switch. Thus a +12V
Dc voltage is applied across the relay coils which triggers
(turns on) the relay and in turn the relay circuit gets
closed and the few pins are shorted thereby applying the
+220V AC supply across the device and the device turns
on.

4. CONCLUSION

Through the effective and thorough implementation of

Home Automation System, we can safely deduce the
following:
Fig 5: Online Web Panel

978-1-4799-6393-5/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE

 IEEE International Conference on Advances in Engineering & Technology Research (ICAETR - 2014),
August 01-02, 2014, Dr. Virendra Swarup Group of Institutions, Unnao, India

REFERENCES

[1] K. Bromley, M. Perry, and G. Webb. "Trends in Smart Home

Systems, Connectivity and Services", www.nextwave.org.uk,
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[2] A. R. Al-Ali and M. Al-Rousan, "Java-based home

automation system", IEEE Transactions on Consumer
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[3] N. Sriskanthan, F. Tan and A. Karande, "Bluetooth based

home automation system", Microprocessors and Microsystems,
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[4] H. Ardam and I. Coskun, "A remote controller for home and
office appliances by telephone", IEEE Transactions on
Consumer Electronics, vol. 44, no. 4, pp. 1291-1297, 1998.
Fig 6: Android App controlling home
[5] T. Saito, I. Tomoda, Y. Takabatake, J. Ami and K. Teramoto,
"Home Gateway Architecture And Its Implementation", IEEE
International Conference on Consumer Electronics, pp. 194-
1. With little power consumption, the devices can be 195, 2000.
successfully controlled remotely. The additional power
consumption is only of the server, which can be reduced [6] N. Kushiro, S. Suzuki, M. Nakata, H. Takahara and M.
by choosing a lighter server like a mobile device. In Inoue, "Integrated home gateway controller for home energy
return, the appliances are controlled from a considerable management system", IEEE International Conference on
distance, marking a significant utilization of energy. Consumer Electronics, pp. 386-387, 2003.

2. The system can be easily incorporated with all kinds of

home and office designs. The android application as well
as the Admin panel can be easily twisted and edited to
present the layout of any house or office block, and as
such, the system can be easily integrated with all kinds of
architectural designs.

3. The switching circuit is fool proof and consumes little

power of its own. The transistor is used in combination
with the relay, so that the overall circuit does not consume
excess power as a relay alone would have consumed, and
the efficiency and power saving motive of the project is
fulfilled. The larger the system for which it is
implemented, the more the power savings.

4. The system is fully secure and safe giving complete

freedom and power to the user. The Admin Panel
providing total control to the user to add/remove devices
entitles the user to easily change to a new mobile phone
and remove the old one from the device list. The Panel is
password protected with options to change the password,
ensuring no one but the user has access to it.

978-1-4799-6393-5/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE