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Bluetooth-Based Home Automation System

Using an Android Phone

Article · September 2014

DOI: 10.11113/jt.v70.3463

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 Jurna Full paper
l
Teknolog
i
Bluetooth-Based Home Automation System Using an Android Phone
Amirah ‘Aisha Badrul Hishama, Mohamad Hafis Izran Ishaka*, Chan Kok Teika, Zaharuddin Mohameda, Nurul Hawani Idrisb
a
Control and Mechatronic Engineering Department, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310 UTM Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia
b
Faculty of Geoinformation and Real Estate, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310 UTM Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia

*Corresponding author: [email protected]

Article history Abstract

Received :5 February 2014 Implementation of home automation using the latest technology gives us more convenience, security and
Received in revised form : safety. Smartphone affordability increases every year and smartphones have begun to play important roles
7 April 2014 in our daily lives due to their size and portability. Google’s Android operating system (OS) is one of the
Accepted :20 May 2014 leading and most preferred smartphones. Controlling home appliances by using an Android phone gives
users the ability to control their home appliances anywhere and at any time while at home and saves time
Graphical abstract spent in searching for the remote control unit of home automation systems since the user’s phone is
usually kept close at hand. This project presents the design and implementation of a low cost prototype of
a Bluetooth-based home automation system using an Android phone. The design uses an Arduino Mega
2560-R3 board and the home appliances are physically connected to input/output ports of this board via
relays. Cytron BlueBee is used to establish wireless communication between them. BluetoothHome, an
Android application, is developed to provide a user friendly graphical user interface (GUI) for the remote
control of home appliances.

Keywords: Home automation; android; bluetooth

© 2014 Penerbit UTM Press. All rights reserved.

 1.0 INTRODUCTION
words, the Android phone has become the most popular and
commonly used OS in society.
Home automation systems are implemented to increase user
convenience in the control of home appliances either via wired or
wireless communication [1–5]. The word “wired” means that the
home appliances are physically connected to a server or central
controller to the home automation system, while “wireless” means
that home appliances are connected wirelessly to a server or
central controller or remote control unit. LightwaveRF is a home
automation systems company that utilizes a wireless connection
between the remote control unit and home appliances [6]. Figure 1
shows the LightwaveRF “smart” power socket and remote control
unit. Figure 1 LightwaveRF “smart” power socket and remote control unit [1]
Home appliances such as TVs, DVD players, air
conditioning and other devices come with their respective remote
control units. When a home automation system is installed, there  2.0 LITERATURE REVIEW
is the addition of at least one more remote control unit [7].
Nowadays, people are inseparable from their smartphones. A 2.1 Home Automation Systems
total of 5000 people from the US, UK, China, India, South Korea,
South Africa, Indonesia and Brazil took a smartphone survey Home automation or domestic robotics (domotics) is a
which was organized by Time magazine. This survey found that combination of automation technologies and computer science
the majority were highly attached to their phones, whereby 84% [7]. High affordability and connectivity through smartphones and
claimed that they could not go a single day without their phones tablets has increased the popularity of home automation in recent
[8]. years [10–12]. The life quality of the elderly and disabled can be
Android [9] has 75% worldwide of the smartphone market improved by using home automation. Radio frequency (RF) is one
share and a total of 136 million Android phones were sold in the of the techniques used in the home automation network to control
third quarter of 2012 [10]. Android has become the top mobile and monitor home appliances.
gadget operating system (OS) on the market today. In other Home automation consists of electronic programmable
controls for home appliances using wired or wireless
communication. A smart home controller connects the entire
70:3 (2014) 57–61 | www.jurnalteknologi.utm.my | eISSN 2180–3722 |
5 Mohamad Hafis Izran Ishak et al. / Jurnal Teknologi (Sciences & Engineering) 70:3 (2014) 57–61

house in a home automation system [1, 11]. This acts like a

2.4 Arduino
centralized control of household systems, such as sprinkler units
and inside temperature monitors. With this centralized control
Arduino is an open source physical computing platform based on
unit, a person does not need to leave the couch to turn on/off
a microcontroller board and an integrated development
home appliances, which is convenient for users. Home automation
environment to program the board [15, 16]. Arduino acquires
is designed to introduce convenience and efficiency to a home [3].
several inputs such as switches or sensors and controls several
People living with physical handicaps [5] may rely on the features
outputs such as lights, motors and others. Arduino software is
of a home automation system to accomplish mundane tasks that
compatible with the Windows, Macintosh and Linux OSs unlike
might otherwise be difficult or impossible.
most microcontroller systems that are limited to Windows.
Arduino programming is simple for beginners. It is good for
2.2 Android OS students to know how to use it since many applications use
Arduino [17].
Android OS is open source based on the Linux kernel with a Java
programming interface, designed primarily for touchscreen
gadgets [12]. The Android phone has been on the market since
 3.0 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
October 2008. Device manufacturers, wireless carriers and
enthusiast developers are allowed to modify and distribute the
This project consists of two parts: hardware implementation and
software under the Apache License [12].
software development.
Google Play is Android’s primary application store. There
were approximately 700,000 applications available for Android in
3.1 System Design
October 2012, developed by a large community of Android
application developers [12].
Figure 3 shows the system design of this project. This project
Android architecture consists of several layers as shown in
utilizes two types of communication: wireless and wired. Cytron
Figure 2. The applications have to be layered in order to access
BlueBee, which is a Bluetooth module, is used to enable the
the hardware. Several libraries are available. ARM architecture is
controller to wirelessly communicate with an Android phone [18].
the main hardware platform for Android.
The home appliances are physically connected to the controller
via relays. The Android phone sends a signal to the controller. The
2.3 Bluetooth Technology
signal received is processed and controls the home appliance
accordingly. At the same time, the controller sends the status
Bluetooth technology is a low-power-consumption short-range
(ON/OFF) of the home appliance to the Android phone.
wireless communications technology [13] and operates in the
unlicensed industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band at 2.4
GHz to 2.485 GHz [14]. The 2.4 GHz ISM band is available and
unlicensed in most countries. Pairing uses two Bluetooth enabled
devices known to each other [2]. Table 1 shows the types of
Bluetooth.

Figure 3 System design

3.2 Hardware Implementation

This section describes the implementation of the controller. The

controller is integrated using an Arduino Mega2560-R3, Cytron
BlueBee, logic converter, relays and other electronic components.
Figure 4 shows the controller design.

Figure 2 Android architecture [12]

Table 1 Types of bluetooth

Bluetooth Class Range

Class 1 100 metres
Class 2 10 metres
Class 3 1 metre
5 Mohamad Hafis Izran Ishak et al. / Jurnal Teknologi (Sciences & Engineering) 70:3 (2014) 57–61
turn on/off the home appliances. The transistor is used to trigger
the relay. Green LEDs are used to indicate that the signal has been
sent to the output pin after it has been processed.

Figure 4 Controller design

The four components used in this project are:

i. Arduino Mega2560-R3.
ii. Cytron BlueBee. Figure 6 Input connections
iii. Single Pole Double Throw Relay 0-5V.
iv. Logic Converter four Channels.

3.3 Electronic Circuitry Design

Electronic circuitry connects all the components together to

perform tasks. A controller is designed by integrating several
components, such as an Arduino Mega2560-R3, Cytron BlueBee,
logic converter, relays and other electronics components. These
components need to be well connected to ensure the controller is
functioning. Figure 5 shows the connection between the controller
and the home appliances. The controller is divided into two parts:
input and output.

Figure 5 Connection between controller and home appliances

Figure 7 Output connection of pins 46 and 48

The input part continuously listens to the incoming

connection until a Bluetooth connection is established and 3.4 Software Development
receives the data sent from the Android phone. The input
connection of the controller is shown in Figure 6. Cytron BlueBee This section describes Arduino programming and Android
is connected to the Arduino Mega2560-R3 via a logic converter. application development. The controller is programmed in C
The logic converter is needed because Cytron BlueBee and using Arduino IDE. The Android application is developed in Java
Arduino Mega2560-R3 operate in different voltages: 3.3V and 5V, programming using Eclipse IDE.
respectively.
The output part controls the home appliances once the data 3.4.1 Andruino Programming
from the Android phone has been processed. The output
connection of the controller is shown in Figure 7. The home The baud rate of Arduino Mega2560-R3 is set to the baud rate of
appliances are connected to the Arduino Mega2560-R3 via relays. Cytron BlueBee which is 9600 using the Serial.begin( ) function.
The relay isolates the low voltage circuit (5V) from the high Four digital pins (46, 48, 50, 52) are assigned as the output pins
voltage circuit (240V). It works as an electromechanical switch to using the pinMode( ) function. The Serial.available( ) function is
used to check for any data received. Returning a value greater
BluetoothHome is able to control home appliances within the area
than zero means that data has been received. This data received is
of the house. The home appliance is turned on/off immediately
read by the Serial.read( ) function and stored in the incomingByte
without any delay when the button is pressed as shown in Figure
buffer. The output pin is set to low or high using the digitalWrite(
10.
) function. Data is sent to an Android phone using the
Serial.println( ) function. For example, if data received is “a”, then
the output pin 46 is low and “Home Appliance 1 is OFF!” is sent
to the Android phone. Table 2 shows the response on data being
received in the Arduino Mega2560-R3.

Table 2 Response on data being received in Arduino Mega2560-R3

Data Received Output Pin Status Data Sent
a Pin 46 is low Home Appliance 1 is OFF!
q Pin 46 is high Home Appliance 1 is ON!
s Pin 48 is low Home Appliance 2 is OFF!
w Pin 48 is high Home Appliance 2 is ON!
d Pin 50 is low Home Appliance 3 is OFF!
e Pin 50 is high Home Appliance 3 is ON!
f Pin 52 is low Home Appliance 4 is OFF!
r Pin 52 is high Home Appliance 4 is ON!

Figure 8 Eclipse IDE

3.4.2 Android Application Development

The Smartphone used throughout this project was a Sony Xperia

P with Android OS version 2.3.7 (Ginger Bread). The Android
application was developed in Java programming using Eclipse
IDE with Android platform API8: Android 2.2 (Froyo), the lowest
Android version that the application can support. More devices
can be supported with lower API levels but with fewer features. It
was important to make this decision before development because
the application is unable to run on a platform below the Android
2.2 OS. BluetoothHome is the Android application developed to
control home appliances.

3.4.3 Eclipse Me

Eclipse IDE is an integrated development environment which

supports several programming languages [11]. It is written mainly
in Java, but it is an extensible plugin system which can develop Figure 9 Home automation prototype
applications in other programming languages such as C, C++,
Perl, PHP and Python. Eclipse contains the Eclipse Java
development tools (JDT) for Java, Eclipse CDT for C/C++,
Eclipse PDT for PHP and others. Eclipse with ADT plugin is the
recommended IDE for Android application development.
Figure 8 shows the BluetoothHome developed in Eclipse
IDE. Four items are needed to develop an Android application: the
Java source file, layout file, strings.xml and AndroidManifest.xml.
BluetoothHome consists of two activities (MainActivity.java and
DeviceListActivity.java) and a service (BluetoothControl
Service.java). These three Java source files handle data sent and
data received and there are five layout files:
activity_device_list.xml, activity_main.xml, custom_title.xml,
device_name.xml and message.xml. There are two other files:
strings.xml and AndroidManifest.xml.
Figure 10 Home appliances are controlled accordingly

 4.0 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

4.1 Running Using Android Debug Bridge
The Bluetooth-based home automation system using an Android
phone was successfully implemented. This prototype consists of a Android Debug Bridge (adb) allows the application to run on the
controller, power sockets connecting the home appliances to the connected phone via a USB. USB debugging in the phone settings
controller and an Android application (BluetoothHome) providing must be selected. The adb driver has to be installed onto a
the user interface for remotely controlling the home appliances as computer before it can be used. Some phones have an adb driver
shown in Figure 9. inside them and it can be automatically installed when connected
to a computer. Phones without an adb driver have to download it
i. The Bluetooth connection between the Android phone and the
from the internet. BluetoothHome is run on Sony Xperia P via adb
controller is automatically established when the user starts the
because the emulator does not support Bluetooth based
BluetoothHome, provided the phone’s Bluetooth is turned on.
applications.
ii. An LCD display is integrated into the controller to provide the
status of the home appliances.
4.2 Debugging Using Android Debug Bridge iii. BluetoothHome is able to control TV channels, air
conditioning temperatures and so on.
BluetoothHome is debugged on Sony Xperia P via adb. A toggle
breakpoint is put in the line statement (byte [] buffer = new byte
[256];) to identify the received data in the buffer. A step-over
Acknowledgements
operation is used during debugging and the data received in the
buffer is [72, 111, 109, 101, 32, 65, 112, 112, 108, 105, 97, 110, The authors would like to acknowledge the Ministry of Higher
99, 101, 32, 49, 32, 105, 115, 32, 79, 78, 33] which is ASCII code
Education (MOHE) Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
as shown in Figure 11; 72 is “H” and 111 is “o”. This code is
(UTM) for providing the University Grant Research Scheme GUP
automatically translated into the readable sentence (Home
(Vote No.: 08J52) and PAS (Vote No.: 00K04).
Appliance 1 is ON!) and displays in the Main UI.

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