The internet of things is the hottest subject of 2017 and here, and as such revolutionized modern architecture a home where artificial Intelligience AI rules. when i first stumble to these project "At Home With Mark Zuckerberg And Jarvis" i start to delve more into home automations with AI. from my research i found out that you can simply built a not too complex system such as that of Mark. i want to describe a simple yet powerful home intelligience with servers and Micro-controllers and how to connect a micro- controller to LAN or Internet and use it as a web server. These new approach to control home appliances comes with an option to control from a remote terminal, with an option from a local server, using the Internet. The system is built with personal computers, interface cards, micro-controller, along with window-type software and micro-controller control software. The system is designed to control home appliances' on/off, to regulate their output power, and to set their usage timing. The micro-controller which is used in this project is the Philips P89C51RD2BN micro-controller.
The vision of the system is to provide an efficient internet based system to control everyday home appliances. The system offers users an easy & effective means of controlling their various home appliances from a remote location i.e. without physically being present at home. The system makes use of the internet to enable remote access to the various home appliances. Apart from merely turning the appliances ON & OFF, the scope of the system can be extended to regulate their output power & set their usage time.
The project layout is explained below along with the
components required to build a system:
- A graphical user interface will be designed as a part of the web based application.
- The user will access this interface and control the home appliances.
- The data from this application will be passed on to the local server, that is, the home PC.
- The PC will pass on the signals to the microcontroller.
- The microcontroller will be programmed in an appropriate way to understand this signal and thus convert it to an electrical signal and transmitted to the switch controlling the home appliance. The end result will be a simple action like: switching on a light.
We are going to divide our projects into phases
I. DESIGN COMPONENTS
The system contains both hardware & software components which are classified as follows:
- SOFTWARE COMPONENTS
i. Visual Basic: It is a versatile programming language which can be used to create various GUI applications. In this system, VB is used for creating a client-server application for the remote and local server respectively.
ii. Telnet: The purpose of the TELNET Protocol is to provide a fairly general, bi-directional, eight-bit byte oriented communications facility. Its primary goal is to allow a standard method of interfacing terminal devices and terminal-oriented processes to each other. Telnet will be used to set up a server-client program to execute commands from the remote terminal.
iii. WinAVR – It is a suite of executable, open source software development tools for the Atmel AVR series of RISC microprocessors hosted on the Windows platform. It includes the GNU GCC compiler for C and C++. It is used for creation & embedding of a program for the micro-controller in C language. - HARDWARE COMPONENTS
i. Micro-controller: The micro-controller used is the brain of the entire system. It will receive the commands executed on the remote server and compute the appropriate instructions to control the home appliances[2].
ii. Local Server: This machine serves as a focal point in the system. It acts as a bridge between the user (remote machine) & the various home appliances. It also acts an interface to the micro-controller. The micro-controller is connected to the local server via the RS-232 port[6]. The local server passes on the user commands to the microcontroller via the interface created in VB. The local server has a GUI which can also be used to control the home appliances.
iii. Modem: The modem receives the command signals sent to the local server from the remote PC. The modem is directly connected to the local server & acts as a connection between the local sever & the internet. The modem used in the system can either be a wired or a wireless modem.
iv. Remote Workstation: The remote machine is the component from which the actual user of the system will use the system to control the home appliances. The remote machine can be any machine which is connected to the internet. The remote machine can be used to access the Telnet client application over the internet. The user of the remote machine will be able to control the various home appliances remotely.
v. Home Appliance: The home appliances must be connected to the main power supply at all times. This is a precondition for the system. The various aspects of the system which can be controlled are :
a. The appliances status (ON/OFF)
b. The output power of the appliance
c. The time for which the appliance is running.
In our next article we will discuss the benefits and limitations of our proposed system. i hope these tutorial was helpful and look forward to our next part.