B. Software Implementation The software implementation flow is presented in Fig. 2. In order to lower the costs associated with the proposed home automation system, for the area where the central unit will be posted, we opted to use the Mikromedia 7 board’s temperature and PIR sensors. To read the temperature from the rest Wire sensors, first a temperature conversion command has to be sent, followed by a registers read command.
After receiving this command, the sensor will send the values associated with the registers from the sensor’s memory. The used resolution is 9 bits, corresponding to 2 decimals. The actuators for the heating and lighting subsystems are formed of electronic relays. Therefore, these components are controlled by Pulse Width Modulation. This solution was chosen because is very useful for controlling the heating elements by reducing power and time consumption. This solution is very convenient for variable control of the lighting sources. The user interaction with the system is realized thorough a 7’’ touchscreen that comes as a component of the
Mikromedia 7 board. The Human Interface module is realized in Visual TFT and its first screen offers the possibility of choosing the desired area. It can be Ground, Floor, Garage, Exterior and Settings. The Settings menu offers the possibility to set minimum and maximum limits for heating and temperature sensors that are mounted in a certain area, the
user can set light scenarios, heating, irrigation, IP address for WIFI and Ethernet communication etc. The access to this menu is realized in a secured way in order to avoid the access of unauthorized persons to the entire home automation system. After choosing a certain zone in the first screen, anew menu will be displayed containing the selected part and the components of that area.
IV.
E
XPERIMENTAL SETUP AND OBTAINED
R
ESULTS
The experimental setup for this solution is a newly-built house (the construction was finished in 2008) which is situated in a four-season geographical area from Eastern Europe. In order to ensure the optimum temperature in the house, an electric underfloor heating system is mounted to the building. The costs associated with the solution presented in this paper (see Table 1) is approximately 275 Euros, placing this system in the category of low-cost solutions. TABLE COSTS ASSOCIATED
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