SMART HOMES

Smart Homes

Smart Homes

Introduction

Nowadays, technology becomes a vital part of our daily life. It is included in most of life aspects. One of the emerging technologies is the smart homes technology. This technology will influence the structure of the houses in the coming ten year. Smart homes promote comfort, luxury, entertainment, security, and world peace. Altering an existing home to accommodate changing needs can cost up to three times more than including the same features in the initial design. Current existing smart homes need special kind of appliances to deal with (Marsá, 2005, pp.96). These appliances should be equipped with a network adapter since they should connect to a wired network. Smart homes also should contain a pre-installed wired infrastructure in order to provide a mean of communication between the appliances. Smart home technology originally depends on the wired network infrastructure but after the huge improvements in that technology, it also supports the wireless communication over multiple frequencies to control the system.

Objective

The main objective of this project is to design and implement a low cost wireless smart home system. The system will be developed to enable controlling various devices via radio frequency. A main feature of this system is that it will uses the regular home appliances/devices with no or minimal modification. The proposed design will include:

The user interface system that will take the commands from the user

The communication system that carries the user commands to the terminals.

The action taken by the terminals when receiving the user command from the main controller.

Part 1: (User Interface Design)

This part deals with the user interface. This part includes designing a user friendly interface which converts the commands coming from the users into binary commands. This interface could be GUI computer software, an SMS receiver and decoder, an infrared remote controller or a device that receives commands over the internet. In this project, one or two user interfaces will be developed depending on group size, available tools and time. The suggested user interfaces are GUI software and internet control (Velasco, 2005, pp 104-110).

Part 2: (Communication and Identification)

This part deals with communication: transferring the binary commands generated in the first part to terminals. These commands could be sent either by a wired network or a wireless network. The transmission media in the wireless networks has many forms: infrared, Bluetooth, WiFi, etc. in wireless network model, Also this part is concerned about how to identify which device should response to this command. Many ways can be used to achieve this goal such as: using multiple frequencies so each device will respond to a specific frequency, or using single frequency. In this case each device will have a unique ID (YI-MING, 2000, pp.43-48). This ID will be sent ahead of the command and if the received ID matches a device ID it will execute the command. In this project, the wireless communication model will be developed in a single frequency. The ID-ahead identification method will be used.

Part 3: (Responses and Actions)

This part deals with the ...