* This was a University team project proposed, designed and lead by myself as a submission for my penultimate year project and the EnGenius fair 2016. The Write up below contains verbatim extracts from the project final report.
Kronos.
Your future home.
Introduction
Kronos is the embodiment of internet of things in the household. It not only provides people with convenient and comfortable living facilities, but also ensured the residential environment to be environmentally-friendly and energy saving. As more and more electrical appliances gradually came into people’s home, the need of a centralized control of these appliances are becoming urgent to many families. Therefore, the smart home becomes a real necessity. The smart home is about controlling the appliance through Wi-Fi technology in the household.
Using a smartphone as the controlling terminal, provides a convenient, fast, and easy to use terminal for the user. The standardization of smartphone operating systems, provides multiple ways to control the smart appliance, these include, tablets, smartphones and even smart watches, becoming mainstream in the future where everything is moving towards a centralized controlling client for appliances.
Based on the rapid development of the Android platform for smartphones and tablets, we have chosen to use the Android system for our project. An AVR based micro-controller will be utilized at the heart of the system alongside an array of sensors and relays and a Wi-Fi wireless communication module to transmit the data over the user's wireless network to the cloud in order to control electrical devices and appliances using the smartphone. Furthermore, the system will be designed intelligently on the manual control of appliances while also communicating with the users’ smart devices* for the exchange of information; such as Current date and Time, Alarm Times, Trigger times and temperatures. The exchange of information will help to further control the appliance interactions; such as switching on and off the air conditioner, the lights, and opening and closing window blinds.
Features breakdown
Manual control:
Manual control:
- Aptly named 'Kontrol', is used when the user requires to manually take control of device and equipment states remotely from the client (Kronos application)
- This includes using toggle buttons and/or sliders to change device states.
- Also known as 'Helios', as in "Sun", is used to automatically control devices such as lights heaters and window blinds
- These tasks can be triggered at:
- Sunrise/sunset (data obtained using the'Weather Underground' API)
- a pre-defined time
- X minutes before morning wake up alarm, where x may range from 0 minutes to 120 minutes
- A part of the Kronos android application contains a Google Now and Google assistant plug-in that allows Kronos to intercept voice commands passed to Google Now/Google assistant and take action accordingly.
- for example: If the user was to say "Okay Google, turn my room lights on" Kronos would intercept this command and turn the room lights on and reply with "Okay, your room lights have been turned on"
- Additionally, Voice commands are regex matched. this means that the used does not require to say the command exactly as defined. As long as the voice command consist of the 3 key parameters, Location (ie: bedroom) ,device (ie: light) and state (ie: on/off), regardless of the spoken order, Kronos will know exactly what you meant
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