Development of a control system for home appliances based on BLE technique

Recently, in Internet of Things field, cooperation between smartphone and home appliances becomes important and popular. Especially, smart phones equipped with Bluetooth4.0 can reduce the power consumption, increase connectable devices, and promote the cooperation between things and smart terminals. Currently, many smartphone-based control system for home appliances have appeared by combining 3G and Wi-Fi technology. However, the problem of using Wi-Fi is big power consumption, and difficult for minimization. In addition, some methods adopt Infrared in smartphone to control appliances. But many smartphones have no Infrared ready, and have to set up many processes to use. Compared with the above approaches, BLE can resolve those problems. BLE has the advantages of low-power consumption, minimization, and ready reminding service. In this paper, we develop a smartphone-based appliance control system based on BLE. The system has a dynamic control menu that can scan any appliance around a user at anywhere. Meanwhile, we develop a device named “Middle-Device” for the communication between smartphone and appliances using Arduino, because Arduino is popular, easy to be used for hardware programming, and better extensibility by attaching a function board called “Shield” with many functions such as Wi-Fi, ZigBee, Bluetooth, and etc.