ISBN: 978-15-08772460-24

Date: 8.3.2015
PROCEEDINGS OF INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RECENT INNOVATIONS IN ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY

Raspberry Pi Based Interactive Home Automation

System through Internet of Things
Soundhar Ganesh S
Final year ECE
Knowledge Institute Of
Technology
Salem,India
successsoundhar25@gmail.com

Venkatesh S
Final year ECE
Knowledge Institute Of
Technology
Salem,India

Abstract- In recent years, the home environment has seen a

rapid introduction of network enabled digital technology. This
technology offers new and exciting opportunities to increase
the connectivity of devices within the home for the purpose of
home automation. Home automation refers to control of home
appliances using information technology. There are lots of
devices on the market that allow you to monitor your home
from a central interface. Thus the already existing methods for
the automation of home are Bluetooth, Zigbee, GSM based
technology. But with the help of rapid expansion of the
Internet, there is the potential to control and automate the
home appliance using it. It is achieved by interfacing the
internet with embedded systems. This paper deals with the
idea of implementing the Raspberry pi based interactive home
automation system through internet of things and to measure
temperature, humidity, soil moisture and status of rain in an
agricultural environment. . Through this project we able to
secure our home, reduce the wastage of water, etc.
Index Terms-Raspberry Pi, Home automation, Agricultural
environment, MSP430, web server, security purpose.

I. INTRODUCTION
Home automation refers to the application of computer
and information technology for control of home appliances and
domestic features. Its application varies from simple remote
control of lighting to complex computer/micro-controller based
networks involving varying degrees of intelligence and
automation. Home automation results in convenience, energy
efficiency, and safety benefits leading to improved quality of life.
The popularity of network enabled home automation has
been increasing greatly in recent years due to simplicity and much
higher affordability. Moreover, with the rapid expansion of the
Internet, there is the potential for the remote control and
monitoring of such network enabled appliances. However, the new
and exciting opportunities to increase the connectivity of devices
within the home for the purpose of home automation through
internet are yet to be explored. Several definitions are available in
the literature for home Automation.
Bromley et at (2003) describes home automation as the
"introduction of technology within the home to enhance the quality
of life of its occupants, through the provision of different services
such as telehealth, multimedia entertainment and energy
conservation". There has been significant research into the field of
home automation with many other communication protocols like
Bluetooth, hand gestures, DTMF etc. The XlO industry standard,
developed in 1975 for communication between electronic devices,
is the oldest standard identified from the author's review, providing

IAETSD 2015: ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Vidhyasagar P
Final Year ECE
Knowledge Institute Of
Technology
Salem,India
pvidhyasagar74@gmail.com

Maragatharaj S
Assistant Professor ECE
Knowledge Institute Of
Technology
Salem,India
smryuva@gmail.com

limited control over household devices through the home's power

lines. Sriskanthan et at (2002) introduced a Bluetooth based home
automation system, consisting of a primary controller and a
number of Bluetooth sub-controllers. AI-Ali et at (2004) developed
a Java based home automation system. The use of Java technology,
which incorporates built-in network security features, produces a
secure solution. However, the system requires an intrusive and
expensive wired installation and the use of a high end Pc. Baudel
et at (1993) proposed a novel control network, using hand gestures.
The controller uses a glove to relay hand gestures to the system.
Ardam et at (1998) introduced a phone based remote controller for
home and office automation. The system differs in that all
communications occur over a fixed telephone line and not over the
Internet. The system can be accessed using any telephone that
supports dual tone multiple frequency (DTMF).
The research available into home automation in public
domain lies predominantly in the academic arena, with little
industrial research being available in open literature. The adoption
of home automation technologies into commercial systems has
been limited, and where available consumer uptake has been slow.
The aforementioned systems offer little in the way of
interoperability. Attempts have been made to provide network
interoperability and remote access to home automation systems
through the development of home gateways. Kushirio et at (1998)
proposed a home energy management focused home gateway,
which connects the home network with the Internet. The system
was installed in twenty houses in the Tokyo area. Saito et at (2000)
defined a home gateway as the point of ingress between a personal
area network and a public access network. Yoon et at (2008)
implements a home gateway that accepts mobile phone signals and
activates or deactivates an LED representing a home device. Ok et
at (2006) proposed a home gateway based on the OSGI (Open
Service Gateway Initiative), which allows service providers to
access home automation systems for administration and
maintenance services. These systems have made a significant
contribution to the development of a home gateway. However, the
existing network infrastructure within the home environment has
not been taken into consideration when selecting the networks for
integration with the respective home gateways.
This paper proposes a Raspberry Pi based home
automation system through e-mails and to measure temperature,
humidity, soil moisture and status of rain in an agricultural
environment. The system is intended to provide portable, scalable
and affordable solution to achieve optimized usage of water
supply. Not only this, it is also used for security purpose and
automation.

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ISBN: 978-15-08772460-24
Date: 8.3.2015
PROCEEDINGS OF INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RECENT INNOVATIONS IN ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY

II. PROPOSED SYSTEM

The proposed system for security purpose and to
monitor the flow of water basically consists of raspberry pi
module, sensor and MSP430 microcontroller. The figure1
shows the configuration for the home automation system for
the security purpose.

Fig1. Block Diagram for the configuration of home automation system

Raspberry Pi has been chosen as the processing

unit for the system because of its user friendly features and
economical benefits. Further, python coded algorithm has
been fed into the raspberry Pi and is connected to the
internet through Modulator Demodulator (MODEM)
interface to access and send e-mails to the consumer. The
Devices to be controlled have been interfaced with
raspberry Pi using relay driver circuit due to different power
ratings of devices and raspberry Pi. A display (optional)
may also be connected to view the instantaneous status and
processing of raspberry Pi.

the changes in atmosphere by measuring the temperature,

humidity, soil moisture and status of rain in an agricultural
environment. The slave3 is to provide the automation to the
system. These entire three slave block collects and monitor
the data with the help of wireless sensor networks which is
interfaced to the main raspberry pi which is being used as a
hub for the home automation system, connecting to other
open-source hardware parts like MSP430 and sensors.
Several different methods are now being used like
drip irrigation, sprinkler irrigation, etc. that provide
controlled water supply, but some software support is also
needed for decision making like where and how much
watering is desired. Such intelligent irrigation is an essential
part of smart agriculture. A different framework to develop
intelligent and autonomous systems being offered
specifically for agriculture domain. It collects on field data
like atmosphere temperature and soil moisture with the help
of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). The collected data
stored in the centralized data server. On the basis of these
data, an expert system generates a decision about the need
of water irrigation in the field. Optimized usage of water
reduces the wastage of water and also increases the
production.
Thus the results for user were generated by a series
of E-mails sent to the G-mail account of raspberry pi. ON1
was sent to raspberry pi account from the consumer account.
The algorithm, read the subject 'ONI' and turned ON the
device 1 represented by LEDI and instantly replied to
sender by an email - 'Turning ON switch l' under the
subject- 'Home automation activated'. The code also
includes exception handling in case of invalid e-mail from
the consumer.
Similarly the same switch can be turned OFF by
sending an e-mail with subject 'OFFI' to the raspberry Pi
account. Further, this work consists of two more switches
which can be controlled by sending e-mails under the
subject- 'ON2' & 'ON3' to turn ON the switch2 & Switch3
and correspondingly - 'OFF2' & 'OFF3" to turn them OFF.
So, the home automation can be implemented successfully
with efficiency and reliability.
III. HARDWARE

Fig2. Block Diagram of the proposed system for security purpose and to
control the flow of water

The figure2 shows the architecture of the proposed

system for security purpose and to control the flow of water.
The slave1 block is used for the security purpose like
turning on/off of light. The slave2 block is used to monitor

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The major components used in the proposed have

been discussed briefly:
A. Raspberry Pi
The Raspberry Pi is a wonderful platform that can
be used to build your own home automation system.
Clearly, the Raspberry Pi board is perfect when being used
as a hub for your home automation system, connecting to
other open-source hardware parts like Arduino boards and
sensors.
Raspberry pi is a credit card sized single board
computer which is capable of doing the entire job that an
average desktop computer does Like spread sheets, word
processing, Internet, Programming, Games etc. It consist of

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ISBN: 978-15-08772460-24
Date: 8.3.2015
PROCEEDINGS OF INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RECENT INNOVATIONS IN ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY

512mb RAM, ARM v6 Processor,2 USB and an ethernet

port, HDMI & RCA ports for display,3.5mm Audio jack,SD
card slot (bootable), General purpose I/O pins, runs on 5v.
The Raspberry Pi model is shown in fig.3.

Figure5. Pin layout of raspberry Pi GPIO used in system

Figure3. Raspberry Pi module

Raspberry pi runs on Linux kernel based operating

systems. It boots and runs from the SD card. It does not
have any internal memory other than the ROM. It has an SD
card slot which is capable of reading up to 32 GB. The
GPIO pins of the raspberry pi are programmed using Python
programming language. The Electro-valve is connected to
GPIO pins with the help of transistor and relay so that we
can switch on switch off it whenever needed.
B. GPIO
One powerful feature of the Raspberry Pi is the
row of GPIO (general purpose input/output) pins along the
edge of the board, next to the yellow video out socket.

Figure4. GPIO pins

These pins are a physical interface between the Pi

and outside world. At the simplest levels, they are the
switches that can turn on or off (input) or that the Pi can
turn on or off(output). Out of the 26 pins, 3 pins have been
used to control three devices in this project which have been
represented by 3 LEDs for testing the switching signal. For
practical purposes a relay driver circuit and relays can be
interfaced with Raspberry Pi and appliances, respectively,
for their controlling.

The program can be written on the pins to interact

in amazing ways with the real world. Inputs don't have to
come from a physical switch; it could be input from a sensor
or a signal from another computer or device, for example.
The output can also do anything, from turning on an LED to
sending a signal or data to another device. If the Raspberry
Pi is on a network, you can control devices that are attached
to it from anywhere and those devices can send data back.
Connectivity and control of physical devices over the
internet is a powerful and exciting thing, and the Raspberry
Pi is ideal for this.
C. Relay Circuit
A relay is an electrically operated switch. Relays
are used where it is necessary to control a circuit by a lowpower signal (with complete electrical isolation between
control and controlled circuits), or where several circuits
must be controlled by one signal. In our system the output
from rapi is directly given to relay circuit. According to the
output of Raspberry Pi, corresponding relay will turn on and
makes its device working. We are using a NPN transistor in
relay and it works based on concept of emf. The relay can
be selected according to our application purpose.

Fig6. Relay connected with raspberry-pi

The home automation system ends up with the

working of relay circuit. In this home automation system we

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ISBN: 978-15-08772460-24
Date: 8.3.2015
PROCEEDINGS OF INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RECENT INNOVATIONS IN ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY

can add devices very easily into system. Also it can be

configured with more security and functional services. the
Raspberry Pi minicomputer can be make use more better to
incorporate variety of applications to our home automation
system. Since our system makes running in low power
compared to other system, it is having a tremendous
application view.
D. MSP430
The MSP430 isa mixedsignal microcontroller family from Texas Instruments. Built
around a 16-bit CPU, the MSP430 is designed for low cost
and, specifically, low power consumption embedded
applications. The MSP430 can be used for low
powered embedded devices. The electric current drawn in
idle mode can be less than 1 A. The top CPU speed is
25 MHz. It can be throttled back for lower power
consumption. The MSP430 also uses six different lowpower modes, which can disable unneeded clocks and CPU.
Additionally, the MSP430 is capable of wake-up times
below 1 microsecond, allowing the microcontroller to stay
in sleep mode longer, minimizing its average current
consumption.

V. CONSLUSION
In this highly developing era, where directly or
indirectly, everything is dependent on computation and
information technology, Raspberry Pi proves to be a smart,
economic and efficient platform for implementing the home
automation. This paper provides a basic application of home
automation using Raspberry Pi which can be easily
implemented and used efficiently. The code provided is
generic and flexible in a user friendly manner and can be
extended for any future applications like power control,
surveillance, etc, easily. Moreover, this technique is better
than other home automation methods is several ways. For
example, in home automation through DTMF, the call tariff
is a huge disadvantage, which is not the case in proposed
method. Also, in Web server based home automation, the
design of web server and the space required is eliminated by
this method, because it simply uses the already existing web
server provided by G-mail.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We would like to thanks to the professor and Head
of Departmant, Mrs.Dr.N.Santhiyakumari, Knowledge
institute of technology, Salem and to the assistant Professor
Mr.S.Maragatharaj, Kiot, Salem for his valuable help and
guidance.
REFERENCES
[1]

Fig7. MSP430 microcontroller used in Raspberry Pi

There are, however, limitations that preclude its

use in more complex embedded systems. The MSP430 does
not have an external memory bus, so it is limited to on-chip
memory (up to 512 KB flash memory and 66 KB RAM)
which may be too small for applications that require large
buffers or data tables. Also, although it has a DMA
controller, it is very difficult to use it to move data off the
chip due to a lack of a DMA output strobe.
IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
From here, I have now discussed the all points
related to this Home automation system. This research and
implementation of idea is based on the new device which
provides flexibility and high economy for home automation
solutions in our daily life. Because nowadays the users are
scared about the technology, they dont want to be
controlled by a computer. The users dont want something
more, but they prefer something known with some
intelligence. The best approach and best solution is the
automation of home through the internet of things.
In this paper, Raspberry Pi was used for the
automation of home through the Gmail for the security
purpose. And the irrigation of water is also done with the
help of ambience monitor for the agricultural environment.

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