The home environment has seen a rapid introduction of network enableddigital technology. This technology offers new and exciting opportunities to increase the connectivity of home appliances within the home for the purpose of home automation and remote controlling. Thus the already existing methods for remote controlling of home appliances are Bluetooth, Zigbee, GSM based technology. But with the help of rapid expansion of the Internet, there is the potential to control, network and automate the home appliance using it. As we know internet is being popular day by day. Its applications and internet based devices growing and updating very fast. Internet may conquer the world under its hub in a very short span. So as we choose internet to control the home environment as it removes the connectivity barriers. It is achieved by interfacing the internet with embedded systems. Here a Web based Home appliance control system is implemented to show the remote controlling of home appliances over the web. It can be organized intranet as well as internet based. Here we have implemented an intranet based home appliance control through a web based interface.
- Raspberry Pi ( We use RPi Model B+ )
- Relay Control
- Power Supply ( 5v 2amp for PI & Relay, 12V for relay Board )
- 3V to 5V Step Up Circuit
- Electric Socket
- Wifi Module
- Router
- Flask Webserver
- HTML & CSS (FrontEnd)
- Python (Backend)
We have already seen home appliances are remotely controlled with help of Bluetooth, Zigbee, RFID, GSM based technologies. The working of the switching mechanism is as similar to the previous one. It works in such a way that whenever a 3.3v is generated its step up to 5v and this 5v will turn on the relay and complete the circuit. This is absolutely a common technique but the innovation with this system is that the system is controlled over a web page and interfaced with internet / intranet. One of the main advantages with this is the home appliances can behave as similar to nodes in computer network. This will make advantage of networking, remote controlling of this home appliance over a computer network. As we know one of the paramount factor in computer network is Internet Protocol (IP). We achieved the system by assigning IP Address to these home appliances (Conceptually). The device we have used in this IP Assignment is Raspberry PI. As raspberrypi is connected to a network that IP address is shared to all of its connected home appliances. Home Appliances can be determined on the basis of PI’s GPIO pins they are being shared.
Raspberry Pi is actually a Host Machine which is capable of running a Linux distro (Here we use Raspbian OS). It is having almost all capabilities of a linux operating system. In internet computing web pages are delivered using a client server mechanism. Here we have also a server and no: of clients. Here the server is raspberry pi. In order to behave like a server we should add server capabilities to it. In order to achieve this we install Flask Web Server in Raspberry pi. Flask provides programmability of GPIO Pins as well as processing web requests & rendering HTML Pages. Whenever a user clicks on a button in a web interface Javascript will form the url and send to the flask web server. Flask web server will process the request according to the query string and in turns make GPIO pin on or off.
Using a wi-fi dongle raspberry pi is connected to a network router. The DHCP protocol of that router assigns an ip address to the PI. Flask Webserver is running over an open port in PI. As the port is open the other nodes connected to that router can access the flask web server running over PI. The other nodes can be computers, tablets, smartphones, wearables etc…Hence the system is universally available over a network.
“http://{IPAddress/hostname}:portnumber”