Design of a Bimodal Home Automation System using ESP8266 and ATMEGA328 Microcontroller

Abstract

Home automation systems are garnering increasing popularity and widespread use due to the relative ease of domestic management and comparatively high return on technology investment tied to its adoption. However, Nigeria and other emerging ICT economies are yet to fully actualize and maximize the inherent potential of these smart home technologies due to endemic challenges associated with poor infrastructure, erratic power supply and unreliable Internet connectivity. These challenges necessitate an innovative paradigmatic shift that could provide a pragmatic technological solution suitable to the context of Nigeria and other developing climes. For most smart home systems in this research context, the status quo is based on choosing whether the design would be for short- or long-range communication network. Short-range designs which are usually realized with Bluetooth technology suffer from limited range issues while poor connectivity, bandwidth and latency issues are some of the problems plaguing Wi-Fi-based long-range designs. Consequently, this research presents a hybrid adaptive architecture that combines desirable features of both short- and long-range modes. The proposed smart home system is based on using embedded systems which use mobile application to send messages to ESP8266 Wi-Fi module. Together with notifications received from the monitoring unit, these messages are parsed by Arduino's ATMEGA328 microcontroller from where instruction codes are sent for controlling the load by switching ON or OFF various relays connected to the load.