IoT Based Smart Home Using LoRa

Project Title

IoT Based Smart Home Using LoRa

Project Area of Specialization Internet of ThingsProject Summary

In the era of Industry 4.0, smart monitoring and controlling appliance/equipment at home, institute, or industry from a long distance with low power consumption remains challenging. At present, some smart phones are being actively used to control appliances at home or institute using Internet of Things (IoT). Here we present a smart home using long range (LoRa) technology. LoRa based smart home consists of wireless communication technology operated by a smart phone application and powered by a low-power battery, with an operating range of 3–12 km distance. The smart home established a connection between an android phone and a microprocessor (ESP32) through Wi-Fi at the sender end. The ESP32 module will be connected to a LoRa module at the receiver end. Wide Area Network (WAN) communication protocol will be used on the LoRa module to provide switching functionality of the targeted area. The performance of the smart home will be evaluated by three real-life case studies through measuring environmental temperature and humidity, detecting fire, and controlling the switching functionality of appliances.The smart home with modular design will be highly effective in controlling and monitoring home appliances from a longer distance with relatively lower power consumption.

Thus, smart home can be fully utilized in a home energy management system.

The project will provide software as well as hardware to get real-time notifications and monitoring of 100s of electrical appliances, to smoothen their operations, processes, and management. The project will monitor a load of appliances also control the appliances through switching.

The project will give information about how much power an appliance is consuming, the current flowing through it, supply voltages, and power consumption.

This will provide manual, remote, and automatic switching of the appliances; thus, it will save energy consumption and reduction in the monthly utility bills.

The product will be manufactured locally, with the skilled people, it will create jobs and support local industry and benefits our counties economy.

Central controlling by remotely turn on and off.

The system will provide Real-time alert/notification, SMS, and call.

Project Objectives

Smart home will happen to be a great idea in the field of automation, this will become a greatly important and interesting when the concept of internet of things is used to achieve this implementation. Smart home aims to provide improved, convenient, comfortable, energy efficient and security to the residents through the automation of home appliances, household activities. Particularly, Smart home can provide increased quality-of-life for persons who under normal circumstance would require close care or institutional care, such as the elderly or disabled. As the technology of Internet of Things (IoTs) matures, home automation has been accelerating its penetration into average households in recent years.

People in business and industries engage with modern tools and technology to monitor and control their daily activities. Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) claimed that 98% of businesses would turn to automation within the next few years to build a smart city, smart office,smart home, smart institute, smart industry, and so on. The internet of things (IoT), a core technology to establish the smart homes, has already reached a market value to $745 billion in 2019. The International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts that IoT will maintain globally a double-digit annual growth rate throughout the 2017–2022 forecast period and surpass $1 trillion market in 2022.  However, the main limitation of the existing smart homes is the consumption of high battery power to operate. Therefore, a few key challenges of Industry 4.0 are reducing the power consumption and increasing the range of communication of the smart homes. Considering this, a low power and wide range (LoRa) based smart home using android applications.

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The project objectives are as follows:

1. One window Operations & Management.
2. 99% visibility of all appliances.
3. Better reliability.
4. Low power consumption.
5. Single Dashboard for Monitoring and Management (remotly switching) of 100s of appliances.
6. Energy consumption status such as a load, active power, temperature, voltage, and current.
7. Monitoring from anywhere anytime.
8. No need for manual monitoring or controlling.
9. Real-time triggers in SMS, emails, Notifications to take immediate actions.
10. Intelligent data collection and analysis to improve effectiveness.
11. Energy consumption monitoring & performance.
12. Reporting mechanism to view & compare strategies and planning, with previous breakout or faults.
13. It will improve the quality of life and convenience in the home.
14.  Greater security and more efficient use of energy.
15. Things can be timed controlled.

Project Implementation Method

This project will present the design and development of smart home with wireless communication technology using Arduino microcontroller, LoRa wireless modules and some sensors.

A hardware prototype will be built, and different experiments will be conducted to test the reliability and effectiveness of the smart home.Primarily, the smart home will be divided into two parts. The first part is known as the sender end, where the system interconnects users’ mobile phone to an ESP32 module using wireless network. Then the ESP32 module is connected to a LoRa module for transmitting data. The second part is the receiver end where a LoRa module is integrated with the ESP32. In this part, wired connections will be made with several sensors and the ESP32 module. The receiver side is interconnected with the home appliances.  The system will provide effective bidirectional communication capabilities.The range covers the LoRa communication protocol is a dependable alternative for the wireless communication between home appliances and a central controller for applications.LoRa is a low-power wide-area network modulation technique. It is based on spread spectrum modulation techniques derived from chirp spread spectrum technology.

    The project implementation will be based on the following flow:

1. Product development of devices to meet international standards for commercial marketing.
2. R&D required for some advanced features like a cloud (Thing Speak and Xiley), Arduino, LoRa for communication of IOT smart devices etc.
3. Proper setup for Marketing this solution for national and international companies.
4. Global Sales setups to target sales in energy sector specified countries.
5. Setup for Operational, infrastructure, and managerial departments.

Benefits of the Project

Smart monitoring and controlling home appliances provides the following benefits:

1. Managing all your home electrical appliances/devices from one place.
2. Monitor the performance of electrical appliances, heating , flow of current, supply voltage, and power consumption.
3. Flexibility for new devices and appliances.
4. Maximizing home security.
5. Remote control of home functions.
6. Increased energy efficiency and reduces cost of energy usage.
7. Improved appliance functionality, less maintenance required, and minimum replacement.
8. Home management using the web application or mobile app.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

The system is fully based on 4th Industrial revolution-based technologies like IoT, big data, and Artificial Intelligence. The project technical flow will be as under.

On the physical layer, various types of sensors and detectors will be used to sense the physical attributes. These sensors are connected to a single PCB board for data acquisition and for controlling mechanism relays are also there for switching.

Microcontrollers will be used to collect those sensing data from various sensors (Temperature, Voltage, Current, Power, etc.), this will be used as a node device. Node device or acquire data ground push to the edge device (ESP-32), finally ESP-32 sends all data coming from different smart sensors to the cloud.

There would be a gateway used, that will provide secure, reliable & authorized connectivity with physical and cloud layer.

There will be a cloud that will be capable to hold highly frequent data from edge devices from various appliances.

There would be a front webserver to access all the appliances for central monitoring.

Real-time notifications will be pushed for appliances data/information and warning if any faults occur. This will provide a reliable and smart mechanism for data collection and management.

Final Deliverable of the Project HW/SW integrated systemCore Industry Energy Other Industries Manufacturing Core Technology Internet of Things (IoT)Other Technologies Cloud InfrastructureSustainable Development Goals Industry, Innovation and InfrastructureRequired Resources

Item Name	Type	No. of Units	Per Unit Cost (in Rs)	Total (in Rs)
			Total in (Rs)	77954
sensing modules	Equipment	4	6500	26000
ESP-32 microcontrollers	Equipment	2	4977	9954
Smart devices, screens	Equipment	3	1000	3000
LoRa RYLR896 devices	Equipment	2	7000	14000
PCB design and fabrication	Miscellaneous	1	10000	10000
edge device	Equipment	1	15000	15000