Controlling Mechanical Processes in a Modern House (Smart House)

Abstract

Comfort, Security and safety are very important factors to consider during design of a modern  house. In fact, automated houses (smart houses) have great impact in maintaining healthy lifestyle  and  minimize  energy  usages.  Maintaining  all  house  processes  in  preciseness,  accurately,  and  repeatedly  manner  are  very  crucial  to  achieve  our  goal.  Human  comforts  and  safety  require  monitoring each sub-dynamic system that is in a daily routine and during 24-hours. As an example of  common  domestic  controlled  processes  are  watering  garden,  opening/closing doors,  lighting,  fire- alarms,  safety-alarms,  and  air-condition.  Without  automation  these  processes  that  will  require  a  responsible person to accomplish each task in a reputable schedule- time. The fact is that rarely one  has time to do all of his/her house work or maybe another case where a disable resident needs help  to maintain these mentioned processes.  

This research paper covers an available and easy way for everyone to automate his/her house  using  an  affordable  technique  which  makes  use  of  small  microcontroller  called  Arduino.  The  development of smart house, which can automatically open/close doors, watering garden, maintain  security (alarm from dangerous), lighting during dark-time, controlling air-condition and display the  results in an LCD screen. Feedback signals from each of the mentioned five close-loop control system  are collected by the corresponding sensing methods. Soil-wetness, Ultrasonic-distance, Photocells,  electronic thermometer are used as feedback measurement instruments, which were used to control  each  of  the  home-process.  All  the  controlling  processes  and  steps  were  coded  and  uploaded  to  Arduino- UNO.