Abstract
We all dream of having an intelligent home that understands our needs and provides us with exactly what we want. Human life could be much more comfortable with an automated work-place or home or re-creation center. There are a lot of products available in market that provides us with a complete automated home experience. In addition, many of these products offer added advantage and feature of consuming minimal power and also accustoming to power need of a device by constantly monitoring its power usage; and thereby increasing energy efficiency of the given device. This project deals with maximizing the power efficiency in home automation systems. Power efficiency is perhaps one of the most sought after asset in today’s world, where the whole world is facing shortage of energy resources. The focus of this project is to design a remote power On/Off control and a power measurement for electric outlets, based on both an embedded board and on ZigBee communication. The design consists of two parts: the ZigBee Control module and the Server module. The control module contains several controllable outlets, a current measurement circuit, the ZigBee receiving and transmission circuit and a microcontroller unit. The measurement circuit senses the power and sends back a signal to the server module through the ZigBee. The measurement data of the power is stored in the embedded board. I have focused on the bidirectional communication between the processor and the Sever module using a low cost, low power ZigBee transceiver to control the power consumption. The power is controlled by the server module; and the power measurement values are received by processor. These values are then sent to the server, where it can be displayed in a meaningful format.