1、1300 IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, Vol. 55, No. 3, AUGUST 2009 Home Network Configuring Scheme for All Electric Appliances Using ZigBee-based Integrated Remote Controller Il-Kyu Hwang, Member, IEEE and Dae-Sung Lee, Jin-Wook Baek Abstract Controlling the electric appliances is the essen
2、tial technique in the home automation, and wireless communication between the residence gateway and electric appliances is one of the most important parts in the home network system. In these days, most of the electric appliances are controlled by infrared remote controllers. However, it is very dif
3、ficult to connect most of the electric appliances to a home network, since the communication protocols are different. In this paper, we propose an integrated remote controller to control electric appliances in the home network with no extra attachment of communication device to the appliances using
4、ZigBee protocol and infrared remote controller technology. The integrated remote controller system for home automation is composed of integrated remote controller, ZigBee to infrared converter, and ZigBee power adapter. ZigBee power adapter is introduced for some appliances which do not have even in
5、frared remote device to be connected in home network. This paper presents a prototype of the proposed system and shows a scheme for the implementation. It provides high flexibility for the users to configure and manage a home network in order to control electric appliances. 1 Index Terms Integrated
6、Remote Control, ZigBee, Power Adapter, Infrared, Home Network. I. INTRODUCTION Home automation technologies have been greatly getting attentions, because they provide residents with a lot of convenience and completeness by controlling the home appliances in the house. Home network has become the net
7、work of consumer related electronics for various useful applications such as entertainments, telecommunications, automation systems, and remote control and monitoring systems. Controlling the appliances is the essential technique in the home automation, and communication between the residential gate
8、way and appliances is essentials of 1This work was supported by the Seoul R&BD Program under Grant No. 10655. Il-Kyu Hwang is with the school of Robot and Automation Systems, Dongyang Technical College, Kochuck-dong, Kuro-ku, Seoul, 152-714, Republic of Korea (e-mail: ). Dae-Sung Lee is with the Pri
9、Via Co. Ltd., Dongyang Incubation Center #109, Kochuck-dong, Kuro-ku, Seoul, 152-714, Republic of Korea (e-mail: ). Jin-Wook Baek is with Department of Internet Commerce, Ansan College, Il-dong, Sangrok-gu, Ansan, Kyunggi-do, 426-701, Republic of Korea (e- mail: jwbaekansan.ac.kr). Contributed Paper
10、 I.-K. Hwang et al.: Home Network Configuring Scheme for All Electric Appliances Using ZigBee-based Integrated Remote Controller 1301 controlling electric appliances. That is, one of the important communication techniques in the home networking is to control electric appliances and to communicate wi
11、thin the house. A home network, a residential local network, is used to connect several electric appliances within home. The network is composed of communications with electric appliances such as a broadband modem, a router, PCs, a wireless access point, entertainment peripherals, and other electron
12、ic devices. It allows users to control electric appliances remotely through the external network like Internet or mobile network. Many of the users can use the convenient and practical applications such as entertainments, telecommunications, and remote control and monitoring systems on the home netw
13、ork. By the rapid growth of personal computers, Internet, and high advanced telecommunication technologies, the importance of the home networking has increasingly emphasized in the research and commercial society. As the cost of wireless devices falls down in these days, many new applications are ab
14、le to be made with wireless methods 1 2. There are many of wireless methods, such as Bluetooth and ZigBee, in the area of home networking. Especially, ZigBee, a protocol for wireless sensor networks based on the IEEE 802.15.4 specification 3 4, has become the most attractive technique in the system
15、environments because of open standard, low cost, and low power characteristics 5 11. There have been a lot of researches for controlling the electric appliances at home. They allow users to control and manage electric appliances in the home network. They used remote controllers, PCs, mobile phones,
16、PDAs, voice, human movement and gesture to control appliances which connected to the home network. Remote controllers were replaced with human hand gestures 12. It is focused on control friendliness especially for elderly or disabled people. Reference 13 tried to use the same remote controller to co
17、ntrol different kind of appliances using radio and infrared technologies. Reference 14 allowed wireless handheld devices such as mobile phones and palm-size computers to be used as remote controls for applications on PCs and appliances within home. Universal control environments were proposed to bro
18、wse multiple devices and select services 15. There have been some studies using the integrated remote controller based on wireless network technologies to control the electric appliances within the house. These studies used Bluetooth and ZigBee protocols 16-18, and paid attention that electric appli
19、ances in the house are managed by the infrared (Ir) remote controller. Reference 18 proposed a Manuscript received July 14, 2009 0098 3063/09/$20.00 2009 IEEE 1302 IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, Vol. 55, No. 3, AUGUST 2009 scheme which converts a control message transferred through the Z
20、igBee network into an infrared typed control signal to control several electronic devices. However, a communication module has to be attached on each home appliance in order to receive control messages in their study. It takes additional design changes and costs for the electric appliance companies
21、in order to be attached to the home network. There is also another problem that there is no method to connect electric appliances which do not have communication module to the home network. In this study, we propose a ZigBee-based integrated remote control scheme which constructs the home networking
22、 system and controls all electric appliances in the house without additional design changes. We also propose a ZigBee-based power adapter scheme to connect home appliance which has no communication devices. Moreover, we implement a prototype system to show that the proposed system is one the practic
23、al solutions for controlling electric appliances in the home automation system. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 and Section 3 provide the design and implementation, respectively. Conclusions are presented in the last section. II. SYSTEM STRUCTURE & DESIGN In this sectio
24、n, we first describe the system overview, and then present each components of a system. A system operation is described in the last part. A. System Overview An integrated remote controller system for home automation is composed of Integrated Remote Controller (IRC), ZigBee to Infrared Converter (ZB2
25、Ir), and ZigBee Power Adapter (ZPA), as shown in Fig. 1. signals to several ZB2Ir and ZPA. ZB2Ir receives control messages as a form of ZigBee signals from IRC and converts them into infrared ray (Ir) signals. Ir signals are broadcasted to control the specific electric appliance. Some devices withou
26、t Ir remote controller, such as lights and heaters, can be controlled by the ZPA. ZPA turns on or off the connected electric appliance when it takes corresponding ZigBee signals. In this case, the devices are connected to the relay of the ZPA, and the ZPA supplies electric power to the relay by the
27、command of the IRC. That is, ZPA enables only on/off control of the devices. Therefore, IRC can control all kinds of electric appliances by the remote control scheme using ZigBee protocol in the home network system. B. Integrated Remote Controller (IRC) 1) Hardware IRC is composed of a micro process
28、or, a ZigBee module, an Ir receiver, and a touch screen, as shown in Fig. 2. A ZigBee module of the IRC in a ZigBee network has a role of a coordinator. ZB2Ir and ZPA participate as a child node in a ZigBee network. The ZigBee module assigns network addresses by the order of connections. It also ena
29、bles communications between IRC and the sub-nodes (ZB2Ir and ZPA). The Ir receiver is a device to take Ir signals from the Ir remote controller of electric appliances for the learning. IRC has a function of code learning by the users. That is, IRC receives Ir signals that are sent from the Ir remote
30、 controller by the Ir receiver, analyzes those signals and then stores them as binary codes. The IRC have a graphic user interface (GUI) environment, in which a user can operate the IRC simply by clicking a button on the screen. The microprocessor displays context menu on the screen, and waits for u
31、ser to input by touching the screen. ZigBee Module UART Micro Processor GIO TFT LCD Ir Receiver Application GIO ADC 2ch OS(Linux) Fig. 2. IRC structure Touch Screen Fig. 1. System configuration A user can control all kinds of electric appliances connected in home network system by IRC. IRC sends spe
32、cific ZigBee 2) Software The IRC software is composed of OS and three applications, shown in Fig. 3. Three applications can be characterized by the type of the libraries used. Application I (Remocon) takes care of the user input via screen interface, and Application II (ZigBee_Server) controls ZigBee modules and processes signals. The last application, Application III (Ir_Server), senses and processes infrared rays of remote controllers.
