Home automation

Using the tendency of "Do it yourself" (DIY), some projects have been developed with a relative low budget. Home automation is used to manage energy efficiency and house security. 

In regards to energy efficiency, home automation helps to save energy in lighting and monitoring power consumption and in regards to security, by controlling lighting and detecting intruders.There is no data center or server for computing in this house. Information is stored on the m2mlight.com platform. This allows to have lower costs, and additionally it is good for security in case of burglaries.

Home automation is distributed given that we use some controllers in different places of the house. For control, we utilize two types of devices: Arduino and Raspberry. Arduino is an Open-source electronic prototyping platform. Raspberry is a low cost, credit-card sized computer.

Different types of sensors are used: motion, light, temperature, voltage and current. In regards to energy monitoring, they uses current and voltage transformers to measure the generated and consumed power and energy.

For communications it uses TCP/IP and an Internal Ethernet network: wired and wireless. Control devices are connected to this network, and these devices are connected to sensors and actuators.The control is oriented to the use of mobile devices (smart-phones and tablets) with Android OS. Two Android Apps are developed using App Inventor 2 and Ionic Framework tools.

The system controls lights, motors and switches, always in three ways: manually, automatically and remotely. The user can choose any of them. This is to avoid the blockade of any device when a control does not work, for instance, no communication, no electricity or damaged device.

Free software is used to develop the applications. Linux and phyton is utilized in the raspberry devices (Raspbian), while C/ C++ is used in arduino devices.


The source codes are published on this page:  https://github.com/caletagreen/Automation

Most projects use the cloud services provided by m2mlight.com IoT platform. For example, a library called m2mData and server functions, to store and retrieve data of sensors, actuators, alerts and domains on the cloud. This ibrary and server functions are located at: m2mData. 

The electronic circuits are designed using the open source software: fritzing.org