WEB-BASED REAL TIME DATA ACQUISITION AND INTERACTIVE CONTROL OF APPLIANCES USING ETHERNET CONNECTIVITY

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1 International Journal of Electrical and Electronics Engineering Research (IJEEER) ISSN X Vol. 3, Issue 3, Aug 2013, TJPRC Pvt. Ltd. WEB-BASED REAL TIME DATA ACQUISITION AND INTERACTIVE CONTROL OF APPLIANCES USING ETHERNET CONNECTIVITY A. DINESH & ANJU S. PILLAI Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham University, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India ABSTRACT Revolution in the technology helps to increase the living standards of human life and building automation technology has a significant contribution to this advancements. The concept of internet of things binds the object around, to the web world to facilitate the remote access and control. This paper presents sharing of real time data over the internet and enable interaction and control of the device from remote location. A stand alone web server is developed using LM3S8962 stellaris family microcontroller with inbuilt ethernet controller and Light weight Internet Protocol (LwIP) stack is ported, to facilitate the supervision of home appliance. A Graphical User Interface (GUI) developed using web technologies provide an effective user interaction. The functionality of the prototype system is checked and verified. KEYWORDS: Internet of Things, GUI, Home Controller Unit, Interrupt Mechanism, Interactive Control, LwIP Stack INTRODUCTION Due to the fast growth in technology, automatic systems are playing important role in our day to day life. Introduction of intelligent system and smart devices helps to save time, reduce the human effort, provides automatic control, eliminates the human error and reduce the energy wastage. Evolution of smart device led to internet of things. Internet of things involves machine to machine, machine to environmental and machine to human interaction. Building automation system or intelligent building system in residential and commercial complexes is popular due to safety, security and efficient energy management. Due to human crave for sophistication and automation; smart building with energy management and security system have become very popular and demanding. Total building solutions include: building automation, video surveillance, fire protection, efficient monitoring and control of heating, alarm systems and many more [8]. In order to obtain building automation and energy management, the independent systems need to work as a single unit with cohesive nature. This will provide increased performance with intelligent control. Web-empowered or browser based systems are latest addition to building automation technology. These systems add more flexibility, easy and remote access for man-machine interface. Controlling any number of device are made possible with an infrastructure less effective GUI through web based building automations. The rest of the paper is organised as section 2 describes the related work in the field of building automation followed by system architecture in section 3. Section 4 details the hardware description and in section 5 details about the software requirements. Finally section 6 and 7 summarizes the results and conclusions of the proposed. RELATED WORK In earlier days, the controls of the devices were done only through direct means by the use of switches. But later

2 40 A. Dinesh & Anju S. Pillai on wireless means of device controls were evolved by the development wireless technologies like: Infrared (IR), Bluetooth, Global System for Mobile (GSM), ZigBee and many more. ZigBee protocol is based on an IEEE standard for personal area networks. ZigBee protocol supports different network topologies such as star, tree and mesh topologies. Home and building automation, industrial controls are adopting the ZigBee for remote lighting control system [1]. The wireless network techniques are adopted in home automation system to control appliances through ZigBee protocol. Home automation wireless network system has an outer and the inner ZigBee network for device controls[2]. But ZigBee based home automation system has the overhead of space limitation. The flexibility of ZigBee control can be expanded by modifying the communication network and by adding interface to the system. But it leads to the overload of limited resources. Mobile based home automation system using bluetooth technology also had important role in the field of personal area automation with user interface [10]. Bluetooth is similar to ZigBee based home automation system which has the operating space and also requires more power backup in bluetooth enabled device compared to ZigBee. GSM network based home appliance control systems were also very popular in the field of automation systems for remote access of devices. GSM network technology is used for transmission of SMS from sender to receiver. SMS is used for universal access of appliances and allowing breach control at home [3],[4]. Wireless smart home system based on GSM and ZigBee in which wireless ZigBee node is deployed in home. This node is interfaced with home appliances and sensors in the home and it will communication with the full functional device master control module. Master control module is acting as hub for the data acquisition and it send and receive the data and control commands from GSM network via control centre [5],[6],[7]. GSM network provides the flexibility in controlling space but leads to increase in complexity to user with increase in appliance. This complexity is due to poor user interface and also due to more request-response messages as increases in appliances. The concept of embedded web server is to realize the full function Web server on limited resource devices. The embedded Web server user can access their home appliances and factory devices remotely. Integrating web servers to powerful intelligent devices will aid in controlling them over the Internet using ethernet controller and also in creating effective user interfaces in the form of web pages. A web page graphical interface provides economize user interfaces and is much easier to change according to the need as compared to a hardware user interface [12], [13]. The proposed work aim to provide a flexible and cost effective solution for monitoring and control of home appliances through internet. All the appliances are connected to the web server via I/O port and the inbuilt ethernet controller in the web server is connected to the internet though the MODEM. The embedded web server is designed with a user friendly GUI which facilitate the interactive control of appliance. PROPOSED SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE The Electronic Control Unit (ECU) is sophisticated vehicle control in the automotives. Each of the ECU acting as a small centralised unit and has the important role of monitoring the output of a system to the corresponding control input to the system. In the proposed architecture stellaris microcontroller is having similar behaviour as ECU. The stellaris family microcontroller is acting as an embedded web server as well as Home Controller Unit (HCU). The role of embedded web server is to connect the home appliances to the internet with the feature of interactive control of appliance from the remote location. The embedded web server is connected to the internet through the MODEM. The role of HCU enables the centralized control architecture of the home appliance. All the appliances in the home are integrated with HCU. The HCU has to control the appliances corresponding to the user input and the user inputs are given to HCU is through the push button switch (physical switch) inside the home or the user inputs from the web page. Figure 1 shows the system architecture of the proposed work.

3 41 Web-Based Real Time Data Acquisition and Interactive Control of Appliances Using Ethernet Connectivity Figure 1: System Architecture The home appliance can be controlled using the physical switches inside the home and also can be controlled over the internet. Physical switch control of appliance is programmed using General Purpose Input Output (GPIO) interrupt mechanism. The control signal from the web server to the AC appliance is driven by relay circuit. HTML web page is converted to hex format, which is executable by server and control code with LwIP stack are compiled using code composer studio. Figure 2 Flow chart describes the process flow architecture of embedded web server. Figure 2: Embedded Web Server and Remote Client Control Flow Architecture

4 42 A. Dinesh & Anju S. Pillai HARDWARE DESCRIPTION Microcontroller The controller used for the proposed application development is an ARM Cortex-M3 based Stellaris LM3S8962 microcontroller. LM3S8962 microcontroller supports high performance 32-bit computing with operating frequency of 50MHz. The controller has 256KB internal flash file system and 64KB of SRAM. The Stellaris family offer efficient performance and extensive integration, with a 10 BASE-T/100 BASE-TX ethernet Media Access Control (MAC) and PHYsical (PHY) layer [16]. The Stellaris microcontroller is targeted for industrial applications, including remote monitoring, electronic pointof-sale machines, network appliances and switches, factory automation, HVAC and building control, gaming equipment, motion control, and fire and security [16]. Ethernet Controller The Stellaris Ethernet Controller conforms to IEEE specifications and fully supports 10BASE-T and 100BASE-TX standards. The Ethernet Controller consists of a fully integrated Media Access Controller (MAC) and network physical (PHY) interface device. Stellaris Ethernet Controller is highly configurable, supports multiple operational modes and provides automatic MDI/MDI-X cross-over correction. Figure 3 shows a description of Stellaris controller with ethernet jack [16]. Figure 3: Stellaris Controller with Ethernet Jack SOFTWARE DESCRIPTION LwIP Stack LwIP protocol is a set of open source TCP/IP protocol stack for embedded systems. LwIP is a few lines of code to implement the TCP/IP protocol stack developed by Adam Dunkels at the Computer and Networks Architectures (CNA) lab at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS). The objective of the LwIP stack is to reduce memory requirement and code size, making it suitable to use in small foot prints [10]. It requires tens of KB of RAM and 40KB of ROM. LwIP uses Application Program Interface (API) in order to reduce processing and memory demands [15]. LwIP consists of several modules to implementing the TCP/IP protocols (IP, ICMP, UDP, and TCP) and a number of additional support modules. The support modules consists of the operating system emulation layer, network interface functions, the buffer and memory management subsystems and functions for computing the Internet checksum [15]. The initialization process LwIP is as follows: first call the stack initialization, and through the hardware abstraction layer initialize the Ethernet controller with MAC address and, then call the IP address initialization followed by the private initialization of LwIP. Figure 3 shows the LwIP protocol stack [15].

5 43 Web-Based Real Time Data Acquisition and Interactive Control of Appliances Using Ethernet Connectivity Figure 4: LWIP Protocol Stack HYPER TEXT TRANSFER PROTOCOL (HTTP) HTTP is an application layer protocol designed within the LwIP stack. The HTTP is an application layer protocol for distributed, collaborative information systems to exchange or transfer hypertext. HTTP works with request-response protocol in the client-server computing model [12]. In the design, a remote PC with web browser can act as the client and an application running on the microcontroller hosting a web site as the server. To observe the status of appliance and ambient temperate of the house, the client submits a HTTP request message to the server. The embedded web server will performs the operation on behalf of the client request and returns dynamic hypertext response message to the client. The two most popular HTTP request methods are: GET method and POST method. The first method can be used for both getting parameter and sending parameter data [12]. The POST method is only for posting data to the server. The present design implementation uses the GET method to provide interactive control mechanism between the user and the server module. WEB PAGE DESIGN The web page provides a user friendly graphical interface. The web page connects the user, virtually to the home appliances and security system. The web page design can be made according to the user preference and may contain information to facilitate the user interaction [14]. HTML is the main markup language for creating web pages. HTML elements form the building blocks of web pages. It can embed JavaScript, which cause the behaviour of web pages. JavaScript and the XMLHttpRequest object provide a method for exchanging data asynchronously between browser and server without interfering with the existing page [17]. When the user request server to observe the appliances status, a dynamic web page is created on server-side depending on the user request and then web page is served to the user. RESULTS In this section, the results of the proposed methodology to control the devices over internet through ethernet connectivity using LM3S8962 controller is presented. Figure 5 shows the home page of the web based real time data acquisition system, after entering the embedded web server IP address. Once the home page is loaded, the user need to

6 44 A. Dinesh & Anju S. Pillai provide a security key to facilitate the further access to home appliances. This ensures the security feature to user access. The devices can be controlled either by direct or remote control. In the current implementation two devices are considered a lamp and a motor. Also, ambient temperature measured by LM35 sensor and its output is fed to analog channel of the microcontroller and measured temperature is transferred to the web page. The independent control of devices is also verified. Figure 6, Figure 7 shows the independent control of appliances from the web control panel and Figure 8 shows the direct control of appliances from inside the home though the home control unit. Figure 5: Home Page Figure 6: Web Control Panel for Home Appliances Figure 7: Independent Control of Appliances from Web Panel

7 45 Web-Based Real Time Data Acquisition and Interactive Control of Appliances Using Ethernet Connectivity Figure 8: Push Button Control Switch of Appliance inside the Home and Status Update in Web Panel CONCLUSIONS The paper presents a web based control of home appliances through the Ethernet connectivity. The System on Chip (SoC) solution tailors, server cost and without the compromising performance and functionality. Rapid technology development in silicon devices led to improvements in flexibility of interactive control of device with an effective user interface. In future the embedded web server can be designed with Wi-Fi and Ethernet, which is co-existence technology on a single-chip. So the home appliances can also control from Wi-Fi enabled smart device with high graphical interface. This feature will enhance the control mechanisms with multiple technologies. REFERENCES 1. Maoheng Sun, Qian Liu & Min Jiang An Implementation of Remote Lighting Control System Based on Zigbee Technology and Soc Solution, International Conference on Audio, Language and Image Processing( ICALIP), (pp ) 2. Yang Li, Ji Maorong, Gao Zhenru, Zhang Weiping & Guo Tao. (2009). Design of Home Automation System based on Zigbee Wireless Sensor Network, International Conference on Information Science and Engineering (ICISE) 3. Tahmina Begum, Md. Shazzat Hossain, Md. Bashir Uddin & Md. Shaheen Hasan Chowdhury,(2009). Design and Development of Activation and Monitoring of Home Automation System via SMS through Microcontroller, International Conference on Computers and Devices for Communication. 4. Gang Cao, Tiefeng Xu, Taijun Liu, Yan Ye & Gaoming Xu. A GSM-Based Wireless Remote Controller. 5. GAO Song, QIAN Yun, CAO Fang, WANG Lipeng. (2011).The Design of Smart Window Control System Based on GSM Network, IEEE 6. Arbab Waheed Ahmad, Naeem Jan, Naeem Jan & Naeem Jan. Implementation of ZigBee-GSM based Home Security Monitoring and Remote Control system 7. Gao Mingming, Shaoliangshan, Huixiaowei & Sunqingwei. (2010) The system of wireless smart house based on GSM and ZigBee, International Conference on Intelligent Computation Technology and Automation

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