4th Int’l Conf.

on Recent Advances in Information Technology | RAIT-2018 |

IoT based Smart Home Automation System using

Sensor Node
Himanshu Singh‫כ‬, Vishal Pallagani†, Vedant Khandelwal‡ and Venkanna U.§
‫כ‬Dept.
of Computer Science and Engineering, DSPM-IIIT Naya Raipur, India
Email: himanshus16100@iiitnr.edu.in*, vishal16100@iiitnr.edu.in†, vedant16100@iiitnr.edu.in‡,
venkannau@iiitnr.edu.in§

Abstract—In recent years, the advancements in Information lighting, ventilation, climate control as well as various other
and Communication Technology (ICT) are mainly focused on
the Internet of Things (IoT). In a real-world scenario, IoT based
embedded system devices that can be connected to the internet.
services improve the domestic environment and are used in Another major characteristic of the present generation of
various applications. Home automation based IoT is versatile and home automation is the remote monitoring and access of the
popular applications. In home automation, all home appliances automated appliances. With the evolution of smartphones and
are networked together and able to operate without human tablets and the development of various communication
involvement. Home automation gives a significant change in
humans life which gives smart operating of home appliances. This
technologies like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and ZigBee we have gained
motivated us to develop a new solution which controls some home the ability to connect to our home network while we are away
appliances like light, fan, door cartons, energy consumption, and indeed. There are many advantages associated with home
level of the Gas cylinder using various sensors like LM35, IR automation. One of the advantages is the immense potential
sensors, LDR module, Node MCU ESP8266, and Arduino UNO. for energy conservation and cost saving.
The proposed solution uses the sensor and detects the presence or
absence of a human object in the housework accordingly. Our The efficient home automation system is proposed in this
solution also provides information about the energy consumed by paper. The significant contributions of this paper are as
the house owner regularly in the form of message. Also, it checks, follows:
the level of gas in the gas cylinder if it reaches lesser than the 1) Initially, we automate the functioning of some essential
threshold, it automatically books the gas and sends a reference
number as a message to the house owner. The proposed solution
home appliances like fans, lights, air-conditioners and
is deployed and tested for various conditions. Finally, in this water heaters by the readings received by various
paper, the working model of our proposed solution is developed sensors installed at different parts of the house.
as a prototype and explained as a working model. 2) All These sensors will be connected to the Node MCU
Keywords—Smarthome; IoT;Homeautomation; Sensors; ICT; ESP8266 or the Arduino Uno which will process the
I. INTRODUCTION readings received by the sensors and control the relays
connected to the appliances
The Internet of Things [1] is the interconnection of the
3) A CT sensor is used to measure the energy consumed in
various computing devices embedded in the daily appliances
the home regularly and updated in the database. Further,
to the internet, thus enabling them to communicate with each
our solution uses database values and calculates power
other. This enhances the end users quality of life and to
bill and it notifies through the SMS for every 15 days.
improve efficiency and sustainability in the day to day
4) A load sensor has also been connected to the Arduino
activities. In shortly, many of the smart devices will be
which keeps a track on the amount of LPG in the
communicating over IoT [2] The analyst firm Gartner predicts
cylinder. If the weight of the cylinder reaches a certain
that by 2020 there will be more than 20 billion devices
threshold, then a SMS is directly sent to the gas booking
connected to the Internet of Things. As we will approach that
agency and the user is notified about the booking along
value, it is predicted that around $6 billion will flow into the
with the unique booking ID.
various domains of IoT like application development, device
hardware, system integration, data storage, security, and This paper is henceforth is organized as follows. The
connectivity. Nearly $6 Trillion will be spent on IoT solutions existing home automation solutions are explained in Section
by 2025. II. Motivation is described in Section III. Section IV discusses
We are living in a world that is rapidly evolving regarding the proposed work. Finally, the paper is concluded in Section
automation. Automation is the ability to schedule events for V.
the devices connected to the local network or the internet II. RELATED WORK
through time-related or stimulus-triggered programs. From Home Automation has been on the rise in the recent times.
large industries to small offices, everywhere the concept of Starting from agriculture, to the cities having the tallest of the
automation are being implemented to reduce human skyscrapers are inclined towards automation. In this section,
intervention and to improve energy efficiency and productivity. we will discuss the various existing solutions proposed by
Home automation or domestics is the process of automating different research papers.
the various appliances inside a house thus converting it into a In [5] the author uses 433 MHz radio frequency control
smart house [3, 4]. It involves the automation of heating, module to control the home appliances directly. Gadgets like
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4th Int’l Conf. on Recent Advances in Information Technology | RAIT-2018
smartphones and tablets can be directly connected to the
central controller using the Wi-Fi interface. The only problem
with radio signals is that they can be easily intercepted and
are prone to distortions due to interference.
In [6] the author uses the Blue tooth 4.0 protocol to establish
communication between the “smart home appliances” and the
user. The user can use cell-phones or tablets to control these
appliances remotely. The only disadvantage of using Blue
tooth technology is that the devices can only be controlled
from short range. As an Example in [7], the author’s proposed
Blue tooth based home automation systems. In this solution,
the home appliances are controlled based on Android
smartphones without the Internet controllability. All the home Fig. 1: Proposed System Configuration
appliances are physically connected to the Blue tooth
controller and it is controlled by using Smartphone. However,
in this solution, the home appliances are not remotely III. MOTIVATION
connected and not able to operate remotely. Home Automation has been on the rise in the past few
IoT based home automation using android phones [8] is years. With ever-evolving technology, there have been
proposed. In this, the authors used two types of home smarter and more advanced solutions in the domain of home
automation, i.e., Blue tooth and Ethernet-based. Also, the automation. To enhance the standard of living, the appliances
customized Android-based mobile application was used to need to be wholly automated without any user intervention in
control the home applications like Fan, TV, AC, etc. any form whatsoever. This enables the end user hassle-free
Nonetheless, data sources in the prototype is not clear and it interaction with the appliances as the appliances learn and
leads deadlock situation when multiple Android phones try to react as per the user's requirements without him physically
access same web portal. pressing a button. Wired sensor systems are more difficult to
handle and also require much amount of wiring the sensors at
In [9] a smart data acquisition system and energy
different locations. Thus, the importance of wireless sensor
management system has been created which displays the
node has been on the rise and is a critical factor for efficient
necessary data on a web page with the help of SMS, GPRS
implementation of home automation. Energy saving is one of
and email alerts. The ARM microcontroller has been used for
the significant advantages of automating home appliances.
controlling the devices and for wireless communication. The
Thus, the user must be kept aware of the energy consumption
system was designed based on the IEEE1451 protocol which
of the automated appliances. In a developing country like
focuses on defining transducer electronic data sheet for all the
India, where people have busy life schedules, providing
transducers used.
efficient energy saving and comfort at low prices and higher
The low cost, flexible and ubiquitous smart home system is efficiency is of utmost importance.
presented [10]. In this, Arduino Ethernet is used to
communicate over the Internet with the customized IV. PROPOSED SYSTEM
application installed in on Android mobile. The Arduino The proposed system configuration and prototype is shown
device is integrated with various sensors like humidity in Fig. 1 and 2. The following sections explain about the
sensors, temperature sensors, smoke/gas sensors. All these working modules, involved in the proposed solution.
sensors are controlled by the mobile application used by the
user. The proposed prototype is tested and has analyzed the A. System Design
efficiency. However, the proposed system generated alerts in Our proposed prototype mainly consists of three layers of
the form e-mail messages, when the particular home implementation, namely:
application reaches the given threshold.
• Sensor Node Layer
In [11] an Ethernet-based smart home automation and • Sensor Data and Database Interface Layer
energy management system has been proposed based on the • Server and Notification Layer
Intel Galileo development board. Various sensors have been 1) Sensor Node Layer: The sensors, namely, light sensor,
used to control the home appliances as well as to maintain the IR sensor and temperature sensor are connected to the
security of the house. NodeMCU ESP8266. The CT sensor, HX711 ADC
In [12] a TI Wi-Fi CC3200 Launchpad has been integrated module and the load cell are connected to the Arduino
with a PIR sensor to detect motion and send a voice call to the coupled with Ethernet shield. The sensors acquire the
owner of the house. The owner can then decide whether to data of the variables of the home environment and send
disable the security system or not. He can also remotely the data to the NodeMCU. The NodeMCU then
control the home appliances. This implementation also does
very little regarding automation.

978-1-5386-3039-6/18/$31.00©2018 IEEE
4th Int’l Conf. on Recent Advances in Information Technology | RAIT-2018 |

Fig. 3: Sample Database structure

data is received by the database in respective tables.

At the start of the month, the user is notified about the
weight of the gas cylinder and the cumulative units
Fig. 2: Proposed Prototype design consumed by the automated appliances. The user is also
notified about the new gas booking along with its ID if
the weight of the gas reaches less than the threshold
Triggers the relays connected to the lights, blinds, fan, value. Sample notification messages about no units
air conditioner and the heater as and when the necessary consumed, electricity charge and status of the Gas
conditions are met. A microcontroller is a control device cylinder are shown in Figure 4.
that comes embedded with peripherals, memory and a
B. Objectives:
processor. The remote controlling and automation of the
appliances are made possible by the microcontroller The sensor node senses the real-time changes in all the
which is programmed to process the response produced variables in the room using various sensors. The
by the various sensors and to trigger the appliances microcontroller assimilates the sensors data and then triggers
according to the automation architecture. The two the relays connected to the appliances, thus automating them
microcontrollers used in the project are: without any user intervention. The energy of the automated
appliances along with the units consumed, the total price and
• Arduino Uno: Arduino Uno is a microcontroller
a reminder of booking a new gas cylinder beforehand is sent to
board based on the ATmega328P microprocessor. It
the database. The PHP program then notifies the user about the
has 14 digital I/O pins, six analog inputs along with
price incurred for every 15 days and a reminder for booking a
various other ports and jacks. The Arduino can be
new gas cylinder day before completion of the existing one.
powered directly by the computer with the help of
the USB cable provided, or it can be powered using
C. Implementation Details
an AC-to-DC adapter or a battery. The Arduino can
be programmed using the Arduino IDE which is 1) Data Flow Diagram (DFD): The working model is
based on the C programming language. It is a shown in the form of DFD as given in Figure 5 and explained
relatively compact and easy to handle the device below:
with many processing capabilities. • The sensors in the sensory nodes detect the values of the
• Node MCU ESP8266: The ESP8266 is a low-cost variables in the environment and send it to the Analog to
Wi-Fi chip with full TCP/IP stack and MCU Digital Converter.
(microcontroller unit) capability produced by a • The ADC relays the converted data to the microcontroller
Shanghai-based Chinese manufacturer, Espressif which processes the obtained value set.
Systems. The low cost, compact size and the • The microcontroller controls the relays which are
presence of an inbuilt Wi-Fi module were the connected to the fan and light depending on the sensor
reasons for selecting this microcontroller. value received.
• Then, the microcontroller flashes the information on the
2) Sensor Data and Database Interface Layer: The CT
serial monitor which in turn is sent to the database.
sensor (non-invasive current sensor) sends its data to the
• A local server is created using XAMPP to transmit the
Arduino coupled with the Ethernet shield. The data
information in the database to the user and thus notify
received is processed by the Arduino (Arduino IDE
him about the price of the electric bill for every 15 days
commands) and as a result, the energy consumed, and
and the requirement for a new gas cylinder.
the price for the units consumed is sent to the database
using the connected Ethernet shield. The load cell and 2) Hardware: In the hardware implementation of the
the ADC module sense the weight of the gas cylinder, system, we are using NodeMCU ESP8266 as the main
and when the value reaches less than the set field, the microcontroller coupled with Arduino. NodeMCU ESP8266
weight is then sent to the database for further utilization. comes 128k bytes memory and 4MB of storage. Relays act as
The sample Database structure is shown in Figure 3. a medium between the microcontroller and appliances for
3) Server and Notification Layer: The above mentioned their automation. The appliances are turned ON and OFF
based

978-1-5386-3039-6/18/$31.00©2018 IEEE
4th Int’l Conf. on Recent Advances in Information Technology | RAIT-2018 |

Fig. 4: User notification messages about Electricity bill and Gas Booking reference No.

TABLE I: HARDWARE MODULE SPECIFICATION

Parameters / ESP 8266 Node Arduino

Microprocessor MCU UNO
Memory 32-bit NA
Processor LX 106 AT mega
328P
Processor clock 80Mhz 160 MHz 16 MHz
RAM < 45 KB 8 KB
Storage 16 MB 32 KB
Built-in WiFi 2.4GHz supports NA
802.11 b/g/n
ADC PIN 1 (10-bit resolu- 6
tion)
GPIO Pins 10 14
Operating Voltage 33.6 V 7-12 V
Fig. 5: Data flow diagram of the proposed system

On the obtained sensor values. Total specifications are given

by using its unique IP address. The Algorithm-1 and 2
TABLE 1.
describe the working procedure of Node MCU ESP8266
and functionality of Ardunio.
3) Software: The main software components of the
• Database and Server Programming: XAMPP has been
implementation are as follows: used to create a local server on the host PC. The database
• Microcontroller programming: Both the Arduino UNO related programming has been done in PHP and MySQL.
and Node MCU ESP8266 have been programmed using The sensor data is read into the table created in MySQL is
the Arduino IDE. The CT sensor, temperature sensor, shown in Sample database structure. To send the browser
and Load cell have been connected to the Arduino. The client information to the local server, we use the GET
Irms value from the CT sensor is used to calculate the method. In this, the information is encoded using a
total units consumed. The load cell calculates the amount scheme called URL encoding. The Arduino program
of LPG in the cylinder and stores it in a local variable. appends this encoded information to the page request
The temperature sensor is used to automate the air thereby sending this information to the PHP program
conditioner. The Arduino Uno code does all these where these values are stored in local variables. Using
calculations. The IR sensor and LDR have been SQL queries, these values are appended into the database
connected to Node MCU ESP8266. These are used to which is being administered by PHPMyAdmin. The PHP
control the blinds and lights by triggering the relays. The program then notifies the user about the units consumed,
main advantage of using ESP8266 is that once it is expected cost and the unique booking ID through SMS
connected to the internet it can be controlled remotely using the Way2SMS API.
form anywhere in the world

978-1-5386-3039-6/18/$31.00©2018 IEEE
4th Int’l Conf. on Recent Advances in Information Technology | RAIT-2018
Algorithm 1 Node MCU ESP8266 V. C ONCLUSION
Require: Inputs from various sensors In this paper, the home automation is improved by
Ensure: Relay ON/OF F considering a Wireless sensor node. A smart home integrates
Notions LS: Light Sensor Data, IR: IR Sensor Data; SM: various electrical appliances in the home and automates them
Servo Motor (Curtains), LIT: Lights; FN: Fan with no or minimum user intervention. The smart home keeps
(val)‫כ‬: +ve Value-OPEN; íve Value-CLOSE track of different environment variables present and guides the
appliances to work according to the needs of the user. Not
1: while (T RU E) do only automating the home appliances of daily usage but also
2: Read(LS); notifying the user about the price of his electric bill in regular
3: if (var LS == 1) && (var IR == 1) then interval and automatically booking the gas cylinder, if the level
4: SM = (1)‫;כ‬ of the gas reaches lower than the threshold. By considering,
5: LIT = 0; the above features, we have developed the prototype and
6: F N = 1; tested. We achieved the development of Smart Home by using
7: else if (var LS == 0) && (var IR == 1) then the Internet of Things technologies. From the experiment, it
8: SM = ( 1)í‫;כ‬ was found that we can manage to make low cost, flexible and
9: LIT = 1; energy efficient smart home for the better and greener
10: F N = 1; future.
11: else if (var LS == 1) && (var IR == 0) then
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15: end if
16: end while

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