Reducing energy consumption in home automation based on stm32F407 microcontroller

Abstract — One of the most important problems in home
automation is dedicated to reducing energy consumption.
Different methods have been proposed which are mostly
aiming for low-costs approaches. This paper offers a low-cost
solution based on STM32F407 microcontroller. The solution
has been implemented on a house situated in a four-season
geographical area. The obtained results are extremely
promising, indicating a reducing of the energy consumption
with approximately 15%.


Keywords — energy consumption, home automation, low-
cost, STM32F407 microcontroller.
I.
I
NTRODUCTION
UMANITY is nowadays faced with anew type of paradigm, generally called the Smart City – Smart Home paradigm. Different classical objects are called things and have been offered smart communication possibilities in order to transmit data coming from a large spectrum of sensors. Monitoring temperature, humidity, noise and pollution levels have become a common feature to homes, offices, cars and streets. The issues that have been identified in the new technological era range from standards, communication protocols, but also human- communication interfaces [1]. One of the key problems in smart home (also called home automation) is the reduction of energy consumption. It has been presented in [2] that approximately 40% of the United States primary energy is consumed indifferent building. In this regard, US. Department of Energy is investing money in order to research proper techniques for lowering the energy consumption and in the same time improve the buildings efficiency. In order to address such solutions, classical parameters as cost, flexibility and scalability are used to evaluate the software and hardware architectures. This paper is proposing a low-cost architecture in order


This paper was partially funded under the Continental Automotive AG project AC_G_xBU_Academy, 5718/01.03.2012, Additional act 22. Stefan Matlak is with the Department of Computer and Information Technology, Politehnica University of Timisoara, Bd. Vasile Parvan 2,
300223 Timisoara, Romania, (phone +40-256-403261; email stefanmatlak@yahoo.ro). Corresponding author, Razvan Bogdan, is with the Department of Computer and Information Technology, Politehnica University of
Timisoara, Bd. Vasile Parvan 2, 300223 Timisoara, Romania, (phone
+40-256-403261; email razvan.bogdan@cs.upt.ro). to reduce the energy consumption costs related to maintaining a house in a four-seasoned country. Such a solution is based on the STM32F407 microcontroller from ARM Cortex ™ - M microprocessors family. This configuration is coming from the Serbian provider
MikroElektronika, being available on the Mikromedia 7 board [3]. The experimental setup has been realized in an Eastern Europe environment, the obtained results being eloquent for such climate fluctuations. The rest of this paper is organized as follows section II will present previous work. Section III will discuss the proposed architecture and obtained results, while section IV illustrated conclusions and future work.
II.
P
REVIOUS WORK
In order to build a home automation system, different subsystems are necessary to be interconnected temperature control, lighting control, safety subsystem related to fire detection, gas leakage, surveillance, power control etc, audio-video subsystem, controlling the house irrigation system, gates control and data communication security. In order to offer such state-of-the-art facilities, different research directions have been identified the results of such research aim at offering a low-cost, reliable home automation concept. One of the main research topic that has been addressed in the literature is that of offering low-cost solutions to the smart home. In [4] and [5] are presented two approaches which are using Arduino microcontrollers in order to lower the cost of home automation implementation, but in the same time reducing the measured energy consumption of the system. In [4] is presented a very interesting application of home automation for citizens of developing countries, while the system in [5] suggests a smart task scheduling technique, being heuristic for the Resource- constrained-scheduling problem. The user interface that has been developed is based on an Android application. In
[6] the issue of human computer interaction is proposed to be solved by using a touchscreen in order to ease the interfacing of the user with the functionalities of the home. In [7] is presented a low-cost secured solution for the energy management of a smart home. The problem of communication in home automation is addressed in [8] and
[9] where Zig-Bee protocol with XBee modules, but also Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been used in order to further lower the associated costs, but also into Reducing Energy Consumption in Home Automation based on STM32F407
Microcontroller Stefan Matlak, Razvan Bogdan, Member, IEEE
H
24th Telecommunications forum TELFOR 2016 Serbia, Belgrade, November 22-23, 2016.
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understanding the reliable nature of using such technologies into the smart home. In [10] and [11] are presented two commercial variants for home automation. The minimum value of such a smart home system, for an apartment of 100 square meters is
1,200 euros, the average is 5,000 euros and can go up to
10,000$, depending on the items that are chosen.
III.
P
ROPOSED
S
OLUTION