Low-cost Appliance Switching Circuit for Discarding Technical Issues of Microcontroller Controlled Smart Home

摘要

As technological advancement in recent years is bringing ease to our everyday life, smart home systems based on wireless networks and sensors are rapidly gaining importance. Research on microcontroller controller smart home systems has become popular due to its low cost and reliability. However, appliance switching capacity of microcontroller is quite low which limits the widespread use of such sort of systems. This paper introduces an external appliance switching circuit for microcontroller controller automated home which has the ability to control 208 appliances. This large appliance switching capability has been obtained by demultiplexing digital signals obtained from microcontroller board using a complex array of 4 to 16 line decoders. The proposed appliance switching circuit can be implemented with 60-70% less wiring cost in real time compared to the typical wiring technique in microcontroller controlled smart homes. Also, hardware implementation expenditure in this research has been reduced significantly compared to the existing designs. Moreover, the issue associated with existing microcontroller appliance switching scheme in case of incorporating manual switch has been solved. The proposed circuit is incorporated with a smart phone application by which the user sends commands to the microcontroller board using Bluetooth as the medium of wireless transfer. The proposed microcontroller controlled smart home system with external appliance switching circuit is quite cheaper than the existing systems which allows consumers to afford smart living with limited budget. Due to reduction of implementation cost and solution of major technical design issues incorporated with the existing microcontroller-based system been solved in this research work, microcontroller based smart home systems is expected to become a potential product in the market in near future.