Building an Application Server for Home Network based on Android Platform

1. Building an Application Server for Home Network based on Android Platform Yi-hsien Liao Supervised by：Dr. Chao-huang Wei Department of Electrical Engineering Southern Taiwan University Tainan, Taiwan

2. Outline • Introduction • Objective & Scope • Characteristics and functions of powerline communication modem • System implementation • Experiment • Results • Conclusions and future research

3. Introduction • Demand of integrated energy-saving system with surrounding devices. • “Intelligent” electrical equipments must communicate and interactive with people and other equipments.

4. Objective • The objective of this research is to develop a web control system for home network via home powerline through an application server based on an Android platform. • The main benefits of this system are license free, highly mobility, and free of wire connection between home devices.

5. Scope • The scopes will be developed in this paper: • Construction of home electrical appliances nodes. • Construction of a home powerline application server. • Migration Android operating system for quick implementation and ease of use and maintains of this web server.

6. Characteristics and functions of powerline communication modem • PLC modem (IT700) from Yitran was selected. • The reasons: • IT700 is a fully integrated PLC microcontroller for command and control applications on a single chip. • IT700 follows the HomePlug Command and Control standard and uses PLC ready transceiver technology.

7. Block Diagram of IT700

8. Plug In Module & Y-Net Protocol • Yitran offers complete reference design and Plug In Module (PIM) with integrated Analogue Frond End (AFE), line coupler and power supply interfaces for quick application prototyping and development. • The IT700 incorporates reliable Physical Layer (PHY), high-performance Data Link Layer (DLL) and Network (Y-Net) protocol. The Network Layer (NL) is implemented using an advanced and compact adaptive routing and automatic addressing mechanism, enabling optimal and simple powerline communication.

9. Relational Table of Y-Net Protocol Stack Firmware and OSI Layers

10. Construction of household device nodes • The low cost single-chip can produce the household appliances with more competitive. • Home PLC appliance node - Host controller : reading various sensor data or switch power outlet on/off - Serial port : receiving and transferring digital data to powerline control chip

11. Block Diagram for Home PLC Appliance Node

12. Construction of application server • The server links household appliance in the home network and Internet through powerlines and Ethernet. • It also provides man-machine graphical user control interface. • The hardware platform was built on a Samsung high-performance 32-bit single-chip S3C6410 which can be applied on high performance and processing power requirements of embedded systems applications.

13. ARM 11 development board • The S3C6410 board is a compact full-featured embedded Single Board Computer (SBC) based on Samsung ARM11 S3C6410 CPU which is suitable for automotive, industrial control applications and medical systems. • It supports many operating systems, e.g. Windows Embedded CE 6.0, Linux2.6, Android and Ubuntu OS.

14. ARM 11 Development Board

15. Migration of android operating system • Android operating system is adopted in this paper. • Essence of platform is independence • License is open and free • Highly accepted in the cell phone market • Android can be regarded as a Linux kernel-based software platform and operating system, it uses software stack architecture, and the stack is divided into three layers: • A bottom core layer (Kernel) • System libraries and virtual machine layer • The Java application

16. General structure of home PLC network A remote PC or smart phone PLC application server A first PLC web controller with 4 AC power outlets A second PLC web controller with 9 digital I/O channels

17. Control menu on home PLC application server Local user can touch the LCD screen on the application server and select the button to control or query the power supply of each outlet and check the digital I/O channels. Control the power outlet or monitor the digital I/O port The server will send and received data via the home power-line.

18. Example of power outlet control Remote user can also control the power supply of household appliances, such as a computer, a server, a hot water boiler, and an entrance guard or security system directly or use a time schedule table which was stored in the application server. time schedule table

19. PLC home appliances control via Internet browser • The data of digital I/O port can be retrieved also from remote user via Internet browser through the PLC application server. • After remote user connects this server via Internet, a web page will displayed on the user’s computer and then the user’s operation is similar to the local operation on the server’s screen. Control the power outlet or monitor the digital I/O port The server will send and received data via the home power-line.

20. Conclusion • This project develops an economical application server based on powerline communication technology that can monitor and control electrical appliances at home via the server. • User can control the selected household appliance or monitoring sensor’s data locally or from the Internet easily. • The user’s interface is quite convenient, via Internet web browser from any platform to access this system.

21. Future research • This system can only process some simple tasks now. • The future research can extend for additional functions: • Video monitoring • Burglar alarm for enhance home security • Automatic timer control for saving energy.

22. Thanks for your attention !Any question ?