International Journal of Emerging Technology in Computer Science & Electronics (IJETCSE)
ISSN: 0976-1353 Volume 13 Issue 2 MARCH 2015.
HOME AUTOMATION SYSTEM USING
WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS
M.Agalya1, S.Nancy2 and R.Selvarasu3.
UG Scholar (1&2), Associate Professor3.
Department of EIE, Arunai Engineering College, Thiruvannamalai ,India.
AbstractThe purpose of home automation system using
wireless sensor networks are to monitor, control the parameters
like voltage, current and temperature. The main objective is to
reduce the unnecessary energy consumption of a smart home. It
helps to improve the performance of control network. Visual
Basic is used to monitor and control the various parameters and
produces the corresponding graphical representation. The
Smart home system consists of controller, system server,
switches, wireless transceiver, sensors and other major part.
The wireless sensor is used to monitor and control the devices
upto 100m. In this study input is fed as BCD code into the DALI
for monitoring and controlling the device performance.
Index Terms DALI, Microcontroller, PID Controller, Smart
Homes, Wireless Sensor.
I. INTRODUCTION
Many studies have shown that home automation or
intelligent buildings can use energy more efficiently than
traditional buildings. Thus, several researchers have
advocated building home automation for reducing energy
consumption. Almost proposed smart home architectures in
the literature adopt the WSN (Wireless Sensor Network) [1]
as the dominant technology The WSN, rather than Wi-Fi, has
been popularly employed for remote control and monitoring
applications because it has a low cost and consumes little
power.
Human beings are distinguished from other creatures for
their superior capabilities of decision-making, and needs
sufficient knowledge and information about the subject and
its environment. For an automated or complex system, various
sensors for reducing energy consumption [2] and are applied
to acquire data from objects and their surrounding
environments. Sensors are the devices that can replace or
extend human beings physical senses of sight, hearing, taste,
smell, and touch. Application of wireless sensor network has
been proven to be more flexible and advantageous in the
domains such as home automation, building automation,
healthcare etc. A wireless sensor network [3] consists of
spatially distributed autonomous sensors to monitor and
control the parameters that includes temperature, voltage and
current .
Smart home can be known as automated home as it
includes control of devices and also for surveillance purposes.
Home automation system required for,
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People with movement disabilities
Older persons
People with low vision
Hearing impaired people
Cognitively impaired people
General population
One of the main purposes of smart homes is to reduce
energy consumption. To achieve this goal, smart controls
must be implemented in a home automation. Additionally,
smart lighting control systems must consider the contribution
of natural light (daylight). Therefore, several works suggested
that daylight can substitute for partial electrical lighting in
commercial or institutional buildings. Sensors and smart
controllers enable daylight to reduce the power used to run
electrical lighting [4], monitoring and to sufficiently
illuminate an office. Although many ideas about smart
lighting control for energy saving in smart homes have been
proposed, a smart lighting control system with high reliability
and control accuracy remains to be found.
The main purposes of the proposed design are to extend the
coverage of a smart home control network and mitigate the
impact of wireless interference for home automation system
[5] on the WSN data gathering subsystem. Wireless sensor
network is composed of a large amount of miniature
self-organizing wireless sensor nodes. By combining two
kinds of technology such as sensor, and wireless
communication.WSN [6] can detect, collect and deal with the
object information in its surrounding area and sends data to
the user.
The WSN has been popularly employed for remote control
and monitoring applications because it has low cost
and consumes low power. WSN in smart home management
[3] Comprises of distributed independent devices which has
critical applications such as surveillance, military domains
and intelligent transport systems. In WSN for smart home in
[7] each node in the network is independent of the other
nodes; they are battery powered small in size with attached
sensors.
In this paper home automation control system using
wireless sensor network has been developed for user
convenience via visual basic application .hence it can be
implemented without any user intervention. Thus, there is
no difficulty to remotely monitor the smart home and control
it in real time via the internet.
II. HOME AUTOMATION SYSTEM
Home automation system [8] has been around
for more than a decade. The main concept is to form a
 International Journal of Emerging Technology in Computer Science & Electronics (IJETCSE)
ISSN: 0976-1353 Volume 13 Issue 2 MARCH 2015.
network connecting the electrical and electronic appliances in
a house. This is a growing technology, which has changed the
way of people live.
HOME
NETWORK
HOME SUB
NETWORK - 1
HOME
EXTERNAL
HOME
CONTROL
NETWORK
SYSTEM
HOME SUB
NETWORK - 2
WIRELESS SMART DEVICE/ WIRED/ WIRELESS
NETWORK SENSORS NETWORK
Fig.1. Schematic Structure of Home Automation System.
Fig.1.displays the basic structure of home system. It is the
proposed architecture, WSNs with voice recognisation are
responsible [9] for collecting environmental parameters and
transmitting them to WSN coordinators. While PLCs are used
as a network backbone to connect all WSN coordinators and
transfer the collected environmental data to the management
station and the control messages to home appliances. The
smart home is the most basic human nature and life harmony.
The proposed design in this work is quite different from that
of conventional WSN-based smart homes [10] in which the
control commands for home appliances are transferred using
WSNs. The main purposes of the proposed design are to
extend the coverage of a smart home control network and
mitigate the impact of wireless interference on the WSN [11]
technology for smart building and data gathering subsystem.
A. PIC Microcontroller:
Microcontrollers had their beginnings in the development
of technology of integrated circuits. The 16F877/A belongs
to sixteenth family containing eight bit and seventy seven
address codes in an advanced manner. A microcontroller is a
40 pin DIP pin out and it has many internal peripherals.
In one or more CPU lines, several number of devices can
be combined using programmable interrupt controller, it also
allows priority levels to its interrupt outputs .Although there is
the presence of multiple interrupts , the operation is done
according to the range of priority.
It is easy to determine the pin function through sharing of two
or more functions of each pins and it is the advantage of PIC
microcontroller.
In one chip thousands of transistors can be embedded for
various storage purpose. The first computers were made by
adding external peripherals .This 16F877/A microcontroller
includes parallel slave ports and it has an internal Analog to
Digital Converter.
PIC16F877A uses FLASH memory technology so that it
can be write-erase many times. The 16F877/A is a 8-bit
microcontroller with an operating speed higher than that of
other microcontrollers. This microcontroller has 40 pin and it
has five ports .
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PIC16F877/A has many applications and used in variety of
appliances like industrial instruments, automotive industries,
remote sensors, controlling home appliances. It is significant
for battery supply devices as well as smart cards due to its low
consumption. EEPROM is a memory storage device; the
datas can be permanently stored for transmission at both
sending and receiving ends. PIC16F877/A has been used in
wide areas because of low cost, flexibility ,low consumption,
easy handling and where the microcontrollers had not
previously been considered.
B.Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)
Sensing the occupancy in smart building enables
adjustment of services such as light and temperature control in
an energy-efficient fashion based on the number and location
of the occupants as well as the type of event. In military
applications Wireless sensor are mainly used in battlefield
surveillance and have wide applications in various sectors
including industrial monitoring and controlling , consumer
application ,machine health monitoring.
The biggest success of wireless sensor network has been
used in smart meters. Now meter reading has been sent the
datas wirelessly and it helps to communicate automatically
with smart home management [14].
Wireless sensor network can be used effectively in the
following
Building Automation
Radio Technology
It can also be used for monitoring device in home, traffic,
equipments in hospital. The wireless sensor replaces many
wired connections and it also reduces the size and cost.
A sensor node might vary in size from that of a shoebox
down to the size of a grain of dust, although functioning
"motes" of genuine microscopic dimension have yet to be
created. It constraints on sensor nodes result in corresponding
resources for communications bandwidth, energy and
memory computational speed.The new technology of wireless
sensor network has brought a new level of building
monitoring [15] systems by saving the cost and time of
implementation and maintenance, providing more safety.In
Recent times WSN control and monitoring system for smart
home lightening [4] are gaining popularity in various
application domains like, Health care monitoring. Many
organizations are developing a proprietary technology to
implement a WSN to provide a wide range access to WSN
from remote location.
In the proposed architecture, WSNs are responsible for
collecting environmental parameters and transmitting them to
WSN coordinators. Home automation system integration
enables the WSN for data transmission with high reliability.
Hence we use a wireless sensor network for monitoring and
controlling the smart home systems.
III.DALI
A Digitally Addressable Lighting Interface (DALI)
network consists of a controller and one or more lighting
devices that have DALI interfaces. Using bidirectional data
exchange the building automation of DALI [13] controller
used for controlling and monitoring light. For individual
addressing the DALI protocol allows various devices. Unique
static address is initialised for each devices in standalone
system [upto 64devices] from numeric range 0 to 63.
 International Journal of Emerging Technology in Computer Science & Electronics (IJETCSE)
ISSN: 0976-1353 Volume 13 Issue 2 MARCH 2015.
At a data transfer rate of 1200 bits/s, the datas can be
transmitted between devices and controllers by means of
half-duplex and asynchronous over a two-wire differential
bus. The configuration datas of DALI devices have been
stored in EEPROM. RAM is considered as the significant
storage memory in accordance with EEPROM which helps to
minimize the EEPROM writes and their life spans.
Fig .2 .Example of WSN
Incase of building automation [13] DALI buses can be
addressed up to 64 devices. Configuring the entire building
management, several devices can be monitored and
controlled. A new concept of [DSI] Digital Signal Interface in
DALI also acts as lighting control interface.
For a single DALI network a single pair of wires is needed
for communication.
Through the Manchester encoding the DALI data can be
transferred .In the presence of electrical noise the high signal
to noise ratio permits the reliable communications. DALI
networks can be interconnected with suitable corresponding
networks to minimize the occurrence of huge errors.
DALI permits the devices of various manufacturers to get
connected together. The main aim of DALI is to achieve the
similar control functionality, for that it needs less complex
networks. Communication via radio frequency
communications and several technologies can be
implemented using wireless extensions.
The systems such as heating ventilation and
air-conditioning (HVAC), security systems are hence
included along with lighting system to extend the capability of
DALI. In DALI master control sections where digital address
generation and transmission takes place and a slave section
where the DALI address comparison and device control
section lies.
For lighting control sensors with DALI are used for on-off
purpose. The lighting devices are controlled from one section
to other section by using DALI. It has primarily been designed
for convenient control of the lighting inside the enclosed
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spaces. The key focus is on straight forward operation of the
light along with all associated components without any
complications.
DALI electronic ballasts can be associated with several
groups at the same time .here there is no need for group
wiring .Every electronic ballasts within the DALI system can
be addressed digitally and individually . As a result DALI
systems cal for significantly fewer components than
comparable 1-10V systems . DALI electronic ballasts easily
out strip the capabilities of the 1-10V interface in their
functionality by supporting status feedback from every
ballasts.
DALI medical lighting consists of interchangeable
components. This helps for perfect lighting solution for
relevant technical factors. In addition to general lighting
reading lamp , examination lamps can also be provided as an
integral part of solution. DALI , not only does the room
lighting system but also it provides intensive lighting .DALI
can able to meet the increasing demands for a homely and
comfortable atmosphere .
DALI light provides optimum lighting for entry zones and
reception areas as well as corridors stair cases and seating
areas. Also in patient rooms ,the synergies between direct and
indirect light in particular are used to full effect. More over
DALI has no limit to the number of switching operations ,as
the electronic ballasts can themselves switch the devices on
and off , without a relay.
When the input to the sensor is high the digital address of
the lights is sensed and controlled by the DALI board .This is
upon the reception of particular digital address of lighting
device send by the wireless transceiver.
IV.VISUAL BASIC
Visual Basic is a programming language developed
and owned by Microsoft. It allows the programmer to create
and learn applications using the components of visual basic
programs itself. It includes graphical user interface
applications which enables for RAD(Rapid Application
Development).It also includes modification of the preselected
sections in BASIC programming language.
Visual Basic is easily the most widely used computer
programming system in the history of software. This was
possible because VB included software tools to automatically
create the detailed programming needed by Windows. The
software tools not only create Windows programs ,they also
take full advantage of the graphical way that Windows works
by letting program is draw their systems with a mouse on
the computer. Hence it is called Visual Basic.
Visual Basic also provides complete software
architecture.Architecture is the way of building of
computer programs that includes VB programs and Windows.
For Windows software it includes each and every thing to
write the programs and it is the main reason to be more
successful.
There have been nine versions of Visual Basic upto
VB.NET 2005; current version .The first six versions were
called Visual Basic and also backward compatible. That
means the later versions of VB could handle programs written
with an .NET Versions.
The Visual Basic program also includes IDE(Integrated
Development Environment)helps us to create virtually
intellectual programs that can be used by all
 International Journal of Emerging Technology in Computer Science & Electronics (IJETCSE)
ISSN: 0976-1353 Volume 13 Issue 2 MARCH 2015.
programmers .Many programmers still prefer Visual Basic6.0
and a few use even a earlier versions.
Here the Visual Basic software is used as a web
based front end that is fully functional working program in
executable form as well as complete source code of all work
done. It performs based on the information they have went on.
The program also allows the users to print off the proposal
documents. Users can also retrieve the data they have entered.
VB front end to generate excel spreadsheet to enter
request number, location, date. Then save the spreadsheet to
send back to purchasing. Highly skilled open source front and
back end, developer to build and maintain a best poke
recovery.
MS access front end program to access multiple
data basis of same type. Main program is for accounting in a
property management firm and this can be facilitate by the
front end. front end can be created for two applications.VB6
is front end is most commonly used software nowadays.
A.IDE [Integrated Development Environment]
IDE is the term commonly used in the programming
world to describe the interface and event that we use to create
our application. It is called integrated because we can access
virtually all of the development tools that we need from one
screen called an interface.
The virtual basic IDE is made up of a number of
components.
Menu bar
Tool bar
Project explorer
Properties window
From layout widow
Toolbox
Form designer
Object browser
Fig.3.Model graph for Visual Basic.
Visual basic is an third generation event driven
programming language. Visual Basic applications enables
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user defined functions, automatic processes and accessing
windows.
The applications developed by the VB can run in the
windows operating system. The following steps are the basics
for developing programs in VB:
Appearance of the applications are to be designed.
Property settings should be assigned to the
objects of the program.
At runtime, code should be written as direct specific
tasks .
The applications of Visual Basic are
Medicine
Education
Research
Business
Commerce
Finance
Accounting
Consulting
Science
Law
No doubt that the Visual Basic software will kick start the
future applications. Hence, the VB programs are written to
give the input and also for receiving the output in controlling
the lighting devices used in smart home.
V. CONCLUSION
Home automation is a useful way of connecting your
home through innovative technology using wireless sensor
network gives us an On-demand access to various system
throughout the home ,it can provide cost savings and hence
home automation with wireless sensor networks are more
intelligent and energy efficient ,so it is used widely.
Home automation control system is also used for the
communication purposes .It makes home networks more
intelligent and energy efficient. In the proposed solution of
existing homes or buildings, some installation costs may be
induced. It simplifies the problem of setting up relay nodes in
WSNs and increases the impact of wireless interference. It is
also highly scalable and can be applied to intelligent
buildings.
Only one smart server is enough for monitoring
controlling hundreds devices such as lighting systems and
home appliances in a home or a small building instead of
using many smart servers.
Hence it is concluded that home automation control
system using wireless sensor network is proposed to reduce
the energy consumption and human efforts.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The authors would like to thank M/s National Small
Industries Corporation Ltd (NSIC) is a PSU established by
Govt of India 1955,Chennai for permitting us and for
providing necessary support throughout our project work. We
would also like to thank the Department of Electronics and
Instrumentation Engineering, Arunai Engineering College,
Tiruvannamalai for their continuous support and guidance to
complete this project in time.
 International Journal of Emerging Technology in Computer Science & Electronics (IJETCSE)
ISSN: 0976-1353 Volume 13 Issue 2 MARCH 2015.

REFERENCES
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