24-11-2012, 01:17 PM
Remote Controlling of Home Appliances using Mobile Telephony
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Abstract
In modern days, we must use various high-tech machineries and equipments to get our jobs
done and make the life easier. These machineries should be controlled by the homeowner
from any location as the homeowner might be away from home at workplace or traveling in a
different place in the weekend. Thus a system of remote monitoring and controlling are very
much necessary. Smart home is one of these types of system equipped with home appliances
which we wish to control smartly from anywhere. Some products are commercially available
which allow remote home appliance controlling through internet which is undoubtedly
emerging. But it lacks the true sense of real mobility and security, making the remote home
appliance controlling a limited term than it is supposed to be. In search of a true remote and
adequately secure solution to be really effective and practicable, mobile telephony is better
than any other solutions. Mobile phones have become almost an inseparable part of civil lives
today. In this paper we introduce a new mechanism so that the ordinary services of the
mobile phones can be leveraged to communicate with and control the home appliances and
make our homes a really smart one.
Introduction
Smart home is a home equipped with special facilities to enable occupants to control or
program an array of automated home electronic devices. For example, a homeowner on
vacation can arm a home security system, control temperature gauges, switch appliances on
or off, control lighting, program a home theater or entertainment system, and perform many
other tasks. Smart home became smarter if the controlling can be done from any remote
place. Our main focus is to control the home appliances from remote place.
The motivations behind the goal to remote control of home appliances are simple. It’s not
always feasible to be physically near to the home still sometimes it’s very important to
control the appliances for many purposes. So the remote controlling takes the control of the
home beyond the home and to the hands of the people. If a simple mobile phone takes the
added responsibility to control the smart home then the control is reachable from almost
everywhere people travels and lives on earth. This sort of high end technology is supposed to
facilitate the different life easing utilities to a new age and bringing things out of the box to as
near as one’s palm.
Backgrounds
Mobile Telephony: In telecommunication, telephony encompasses the general use of
equipment to provide voice communication over distances, specifically by connecting
telephones to each other. The term mobile telephony is derived from original telephony
to denote the communication that facilitates mobility using wireless technology. Mobile
telephony [1] offers services like voice and data transfer. Data transfer is done using
SMS and some other enhanced data rate services like GPRS and EDGE. The latter two
provides internet access facilities to the mobile phones. Short Message Service (SMS)
is a telecommunications protocol that allows the sending of short (160 characters or
less) text messages. It is available on most digital mobile phones and some personal
digital assistants with onboard wireless telecommunications.
Related Works
Smart home is one of the recent fields in the context of computer science. The paper
named as “Remote mobile control of home appliances” by F. Meija, M. Nikolova and P.
Voorwinden depicts on the home controlling using WAP protocol. The architecture
mentioned by them is much complex but it gives an initial idea about the remote home
appliance controlling. Smart home studies sometimes affected by the concern about the
possible harms to the humans’ health. A great research was done by Toril Laberg, Directorate
for Health and Social Affairs of the Delta Centre, Norway. He later publish in his paper
named “Smart Home Technology: Technology supporting independent living - does it have
an impact on health?” that there is no harm on humans’ health by the technical setup required
to support smart home technologies. Scott Davidoff, Min Kyung Lee, Charles Yiu, John
Zimmerman, and Anind K. Dey in their journal named “Principles of Smart Home Control”
describe the control that families want and suggest seven design principles that will help enduser
programming systems deliver that control. Tatsuya Yamazaki in his journal “The
Ubiquitous Home” suggests that automation should not become a goal of the smart home
technologies. In this paper he represents a real-life test bed, called the Ubiquitous Home. In
the Ubiquitous Home, a robot plays a role of interface for the residents. Three kinds of
context-aware services have been implemented and a real-life living experiment was
conducted. The experimental results were also reported. Recently some projects are organized
for building the architecture of controlling home appliance using voice commands.
VoiceXML is used for that purpose. A smart house system named NETVOX [18] based on
the ZigBee standard is introduced recently. The system can use for home automation and
industrial controls. It provides security, temperature, humidity, lighting, sensor, and
multimedia control for comfort, convenience, and safety wirelessly. The system may be
accessed and controlled over the telephone or over the Internet.
Prototype Implementation
We implemented a prototype of the discussed remote home appliance controller. Our
implementation controls the home appliances of a smart home using mobile phones
from anywhere. We also devised and implemented various ways so that a mobile phone
can communicate with the computer or microcontroller. X10 is one of the widely used
technologies in the world of Smart Home. We used X10 Active Home Pro to take care
of the real appliance control mechanism once fed enough input to it. Using this set of
devices, we concentrated on the communication aspect and came up with various
solutions.
AT Command Based Solution
Wherever AT commands provide the computer with the most flexible way to control
and explore the services and resources of a mobile. AT commands enable one to send
and receive SMS from the computer and also it lets the computer to browse the mobiles
resources like memory and phone book and so on. ‘AT’ stands for ’Attention’
command. GSM mobile phones are equipped with built in GSM Modems which
responds to the commands issued as an SMS by the connected computer. AT commands
create a logical bidirectional communication between computer and mobile phone.
Format of AT Commands: The commands are similar to any other commands we use
in various terminals. The commands conform to a well defined syntax. To start with, it
is not case sensitive. The common prefix is AT for all the commands. Multiple
commands can be specified in a single line starting with only one ’AT’ as the common
prefix. The symbols < > and [ ] denotes compulsory and optional settings values
respectively. When the computer issues a command, the effect retains its value until it’s
changed explicitly. The connection test is performed by first sending the command
’AT’ and if the mobile is correctly connected, it notifies the computer through the
message ’OK’. Otherwise it sends an error message.