Internet Home Control System using 
Bluetooth Over WAP

It has always been one of Mankind’s greatest dreams to have an intelligent home. This is clearly depicted in many Hollywood movies such as the Jetsons and Back To The Future II where futuristic homes are featured as highly intelligent and automatic. Clear benefits such as the convenience and comfort brought by home automation have fueled the development of such systems over the past decade, as well as the possibilities for remote operations of day to day home processes at home such as gardening and pet feeding away from home.

Home automation involves the use of microprocessor-based intelligence to integrate or control electronic products and systems in the home. These products and systems to be controlled or integrated have included floodlights, coffee makers, computers, security systems, heating and cooling systems, lighting control systems, and audio/video (home theatre) systems.

To facilitate cross communications in a whole-house network, the home automation community is attempting to develop a technical standard - in the form of a chip - that can be built into home electronics. The oldest standard is X-10. The SMART HOUSE® standard has been utilised for years, but in a limited fashion because of the proprietary nature of the technology. Other more open protocols under discussion include the Consumer Electronics Bus (CEBus®) and LonWorks system - an open, networked automation and control solution for buildings, industrial equipment, transportation, and home markets. Based on physical transceivers and application layer software, LonWorks nodes can be connected on multiple types of media; twisted pair and power lines are among the most common.

Despite the myriad of network in existence, as well as new wired protocols like the Simple Control Protocol (SCP) and the HomePlug Powerline technologies emerging, no industry standard has prevailed to-date. This is probably one significant impedance to infrastructure investment of the home owners, since there is no unified standard and trend on what is to come. Wiring up an entire house (whether new or old) with twisted pairs is a tough decision in itself. A wireless solution (infrared or radio frequency) is probably a solution which is more easily adoptable. 

A wireless home network control system was developed in this project leveraging on the emerging wireless technologies of Bluetooth and Wireless Application Protocol (WAP). The hardware, necessary and used in the development of the home control system, is shown in Figure 1, consisting of a Pentium III 450 MHz personal computer with 192MB linked to the Internet by a broadband connection or a modem. The host computer operates on a RedHat 6.2 platform with an upgraded kernel of version (2.4.2).

Figure 1: Hardware Interaction.

The software architecture is shown in Figure 2. It is essentially made up of two subsystems, the front end graphical user interface on the mobile phone and the back end Bluetooth powered automation system, interacting with each other through WAP.

Figure 2: Software interaction of the subsystems.

In addition to meeting or exceeding the capabilities of conventional home automation systems running on wires, the system presented here is fully wireless. The integration of home appliances into the system is made easy as it obliterates the need for any retrofitting of the house.