2018 5th International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Applications

Design and Implementation of IoT Based Smart Laboratory

M. Poongothai P. Muthu Subramanian

Department of ECE Department of ECE
Coimbatore Institute of Technology Coimbatore Institute of Technology
Coimbatore, India Coimbatore, India
e-mail: [email protected] e-mail: [email protected]

A. Rajeswari
Department of ECE
Coimbatore Institute of Technology
Coimbatore, India
e-mail: [email protected]

Abstract—Internet of things (IoT) provides a platform that household appliances, power generation systems, office
allows devices to be connected, sensed and controlled remotely equipment, and so on, which generate a massive amount of
across a network infrastructure. This work aims to develop a data to provide new services to people and both public and
smart laboratory system in CIT campus based on IoT and private sectors [8, 10].
mobile application technologies to monitor the overall activities As campus grows every year, new management problems
of the lab including energy consumption and utilization of and energy issues appear. Managing the resources in the
devices, environmental parameters via sensors, thereby campus has become a real problem. Monitoring and
providing a smart environment to CIT with energy efficiency controlling the unused devices that consume power during
and comfort. IoT smart hardware kits are designed using
human absence is also a major inability. In addition to this,
ESP8266, Arduino UNO, relays, current transformers,
Raspberry Pi3 and sensors. The proposed work controls and
coordinating the people participating in the daily activities of
monitors the devices of the CIT IoT lab using the dashboard the laboratory is tedious when population of the usage of the
developed in Node-RED or ANDROID STUDIO Mobile space out numbers a manageable threshold. Another problem
Application. Devices in laboratory are connected to IoT smart is power management. It is difficult to monitor all sub-
hardware kit. Dashboard and Mobile Application has been systems such as lighting, projecting and air conditioning
developed for interfacing IoT smart hardware kit & MQTT system. But if these are left indiscriminately, energy will be
broker. Node MCU is also coded to monitor and update the wasted. People cannot check the status of the sub-system at
temperature, humidity and light intensity inside laboratory. A ease. In order to resolve these problems, IoT technology is a
database has been created for a prototype switch to view status suitable method [5].
history. From the results of implementation, it is observed that Smart devices of IoT can be used to replace some
the appliances in our lab are remotely monitored and traditional devices so that sub-system devices will connect to
controlled, thereby reducing their energy consumption each other for better access to construct an IoT network.
considerably. Human efforts are reduced when things gets automated. The
need for the work is to reduce manual effort by automating
Keywords-Internet of Things (IoT); Embedded Computing laboratory resources thereby achieving a futuristic model of
System; MQTT; ESP 8266; Arduino board; Smart systems Laboratory using IoT and Efficient use of the laboratory
resources and power management.
I. INTRODUCTION Internet of things Laboratory (www.citeceiot.in) was
More than 85% of systems are unconnected, and do not inaugurated at CIT on January 2018. It enables researchers
share data with each other or the cloud. One such technology to exploit the potential applications of Internet of Things for
that facilitates the interconnection is the INTERNET OF multidisciplinary research with more end-user interactions.
THINGS [6]. The Internet of things is a communication The aim of proposed work is to implement a smart
paradigm that refers to the idea of connecting the objects of laboratory at CIT by replacing electrical appliances by smart
everyday life to the internet. These objects are assembled IoT hardware kits (Test bed) which is designed for our IoT
with microcontrollers, transceivers to enable communication, lab. All the electronic devices are networked to give the real-
and configured with protocol stacks that will realize the time data thereby providing the accessibility of the devices
interaction of the objects with one another to reach to through a hand-held device. The proposed test bed facilitates
common goals without human intervention management of energy utilization.
This paradigm gained its strength from the fact that it is To achieve such aims, the IoT Lab focuses its research
interacting with a wide variety of devices such as: robots, and development of the following objectives:
drones, heating and air-conditioning systems, security alarms, x To create an environment for research, design,
development and testing of IoT solutions, in the

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 field of energy management, communication using Passive infrared sensor (PIR) and environment sensor
systems, distributed sensor devices and advanced (ES). But the drawback is that the WSN have limited
user interfaces. computation, communication resources, limited battery
x To provide a large-scale IoT system for the power, limited storage, computation capabilities, prone to the
collection of information from the environment and security attacks and have limited bandwidth to communicate.
its transfer to a server, as well as the skills Ala Al-Fuqaha et al [6] presented a detailed view of the
necessary for the development of control logics, different protocols-MQTT, AMQP, XMPP, DDS to deliver
processing and display of data. desired IoT services. In addition, they provided a good
x To this end, IoT Laboratory is equipped with foundation for researchers and practitioners who are
devices for the monitoring of energy consumption interested to gain an insight into the technologies and
of electrical appliances, sensors for the monitoring protocols that constitutes the IoT. They illustrated by
of environmental parameters such as temperature exploring the relation between IoT and other emerging
and humidity and the communication infrastructure technologies including data analytics and cloud computing.
necessary to deliver the acquired information to a From the literature survey it is observed that the existing
server. systems suffer lack of graphical user interface (GUI) for easy
The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section II operation and also due to failure of mobile operators, a
discusses the related works for the usage of IoT on smart message can be delayed. Hence, the solutions suggested in
campus. Section III explains the system design of proposed the literature survey are not suitable for real-time monitoring
work. Section IV deals with implementation of the proposed as well as long distance data logging. The integration and
system. Section V shows the results and discussion. Finally optimization of the hardware and software resources need to
the conclusion and future work in section VI. be realized within laboratory, which are highly controllable
and coordinate, realize the intelligent of laboratory [9]. The
II. RELATED WORKS Internet of things (IoT) is one of the technical areas of rapid
Several works have been done with various approaches development in recent years, and its technology can provide
deployed towards realizing automation in various strong support for the realization of laboratory of intelligence.
environments. Shopan Dey et.al [1] proposed a home
III. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
automation system which is implemented using Smart
sensor together with communication technologies such as Fig. 1 shows the IoT based smart laboratory layout at our
Wi-Fi, Bluetooth etc. supported by cloud computing. The Institute. All the appliances in the lab are connected to the
model proposed in this paper is quite economical and secure smart IoT hardware kit which is unique board exclusively
as the whole network consists of only a single admin to designed for CIT IoT lab.
access all the nodes. They model developed in this paper
provides a virtual connection between hub and electronic and
electrical objects and control locate & track the connected
objects.
Jianli Pan & Raj Jain [2] proposed IoT framework with
smart location-based automated and networked energy
control using smartphone platform and cloud-computing
technologies. They suggested the central idea to generalize
the smartphone and location-based energy control and
include policies of multiple levels of organizations. This will
enable not only multi-scale energy proportionality, but also
create an intelligent home space which is an important part
of the future smart world.
Hu Yin [3] proposed smart lab system for managing
several types of subsystems of a university, including
lighting, air conditioning, heating, audio/video, control
switches, and security and highlighted the benefits for Figure 1. Lay out of smart laboratory at CIT
university and students of using the smart lab system.
Hafsa Tahir et al [4] presented the overview of IoT and Fig. 2 shows the hardware setup of the proposed system.
its enabling technologies such as RFID, bluetooth, Wi-Fi and Devices are connected to IoT kits which has Arduino UNO,
wireless sensor networks which have led IoT from its ESP 8266(Wi-Fi module), current transformer and Relays.
infancy to the verge of fully renovating the current internet. Each IoT kit can connect to three devices. All the IoT kits,
Some of the security issues involved in deployment of IoT Raspberry Pi3 [12] and end users should be connected in
are also presented with possible counter measures, but still a same network to gain control over individual appliances. All
further research is needed to meet the demands of users. the sensors like temperature, humidity and LDR are also
Mary Cherian et al [5] proposed a Secure and Smart Lab connected to ESP8266 module which is present in the IoT
with Wireless Sensor Network. Smart lab implementation hardware kit. In this work, the daylight intensity is sensed
based on Ambient lighting module and Security module by using LDR and it is compared with the set threshold value

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and a light is controlled. Based on the light intensity, the x Current Transformer- It is a transformer that
lights also get turned on inside the room. The sensed values measures the AC current of the circuit. It senses the
are reported in real time and can be viewed in dashboard. current flowing through it and the values are in
analog.
x Relay- It acts as a protective switch. It uses an
electromagnetic switch operated by a small electric
current that can turn on or off a much larger current.
IV. IMPLEMENTATION
The 220v that comes from the main power supply is
reduced to 5v by step down transformer. It is then regulated
and given to the Arduino UNO and ESP8266. If user wants
to turn on/off devices, command is sent from mobile phone
to MQTT server. The server then publishes the command to
the respective ESP8266 module present in an IoT kit to
Figure 2. Block diagram of the proposed system which that the particular device is connected. After the
reception of the command by ESP8266 relay gets turned on,
All the devices in laboratory use Message Queuing thereby providing the supply to that device and the device
Telemetry Transport protocol (MQTT) for communication gets turned on. Current transformer is used in the IoT kit
[11]. MQTT is a machine- to- machine/ internet of Things which checks the actual flow of current. It sends the actual
connectivity protocol. It is designed as an extremely status of device (ON/OFF) to the Arduino which is
lightweight publish / subscribe messaging transport. The determined by the amount of current flow. Arduino, then
electrical appliances and sensors are connected to ESP 8266 sends that device status to ESP8266 through serial port.
and those are act as MQTT clients which helps in accessing ESP8266 sends that data to MQTT server and actual device
the devices connected to common network so that it can status can be viewed in Node-RED dash board. So, the
transmit data via MQTT protocol. Here, all those Wi-Fi Node-RED dashboard acts as an output window that shows
modules act as MQTT clients and Node-RED (Raspberry Pi the actual status of all devices, provides access to the devices
3) acts as MQTT broker (Server). Node-RED is a and shows the temperature , humidity and light intensity of
programming tool for wiring hardware devices [12]. It the lab.
provides a browser-based editor that makes it easy to wire Raspberry pi 3 is connected to a network, and run this
wide range of nodes in the palette that can be deployed to its application in it. An online server (test.mosquito.org) [15]
runtime in a single click. Node-RED application aids in act as an MQTT broker. The control signals can be sent from
creating the interactive user interface dash boards. any device connected in the network to the broker. And,
clients publish the status of the devices and energy consumed
by individual appliance to the broker and can be viewed in
the dashboard. Thus all devices can be controlled universally,
and the status of the devices can be visualized.
Our Contributions:
x IoT based smart lab has been designed and
implemented in our department
x Application code written for interfacing IoT smart
hardware kit & MQTT broker, and for monitoring
temperature, humidity and light intensity inside the
laboratory
x Developed Dashboard and mobile application
using Node-RED and ANDROID STUDIO
x A database has been created for a prototype switch
Figure 3. Hardware components of CIT_IoT development kit to view status history

Fig. 3 shows the hardware components of CIT_IoT V. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

development kit. The main components used are The proposed smart laboratory system is implemented
x ESP8266- It is a low-cost Wi-Fi microchip with using Arduino Programming Language and the devices are
full TCP/IP stack and microcontroller capability. controlled using node-RED and RPi Libraries [15]. After the
Here, it acts as an MQTT client. collection of the data for further processing and transmission
x Arduino UNO- It is a microcontroller board based of the data, ThingSpeak IoT platform’s server is needed.
on the ATmega328P. Here, it sends the status of ThingSpeak is an IoT analytics platform service that allows
the devices to client. to aggregate, visualize and analyze live data streams in the

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cloud. ThingSpeak provides instant visualizations of data can provide optimized light intensity for the surrounding and
posted by the devices. reduces the electrical power consumption during daytime.
In our ECE lab, three different boards of IoT hardware
are used to monitor and control the 4 lights, 1 projector, 1 fan
and 1 air conditioner. This was implemented and tested
successfully. After successful testing, this same setup was
installed in IoT lab to monitor and control the 3 lights and 3
fans. Fig 4 and 5 show the dash board which is used to
control and monitor the device status and able to view
temperature and humidity values inside the lab.

Figure 7. Daylight level dash board for displaying the Status of the light

Figure 4. Real time monitoring and controlling Dashboard for ECE lab

Figure 8. Hourly current consumption graph at the device level

Fig. 8. Shows the graph for variation of current

consumption over time interval. From the figure, it is
observed that the parameters such as status of the bulb and
the current consumption are plotted in the form of a graph
and can be viewed on the dashboard and is updated in real
time.The proposed system enables user to monitor the
current consumption at the device level and upload it to the
server and establish remote control of any appliances from
anywhere thereby reducing the wastage of energy. Thus, the
proposed system helps in energy conservation.
Figure 5. Real time monitoring and controlling Dashboard for IoT lab Table 1. Contains information stored in database by
smart system. Date: 24th July - 25th July 2017.
TABLE I. TEMPERATURE , HUMIDITY AND DEW POINT INFORMATION
STORED IN DATABASE

Figure 6. Daylight level dash board

E-Remote is a locally developed interactive application
Fig. 6 & 7 shows the light intensity level and bulb status
for android users. This application has been developed in
inside the lab. The proposed system is tested during the day
ANDROID STUDIO [14] using JAVA programming
time. The output is affected by surroundings light sources.
language. It is a digital remote to monitor and control the
Hence, the bulbs light intensity is reduced causing a directly
appliances of IoT Lab and ECE Lab which is shown in Fig. 9.
proportional effect to the power consumption. This system
This has been coded to function as an MQTT CLIENT

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which publishes control signals to an MQTT BROKER Thus the emerging huge scope for doing research work in
(Online Server). IoT. The issues need to be addressed are interoperability of
multiple systems, data security, standards and government
policies for IoT, increasing computing power to handle the
huge amount of data generated by sensors, increasing
availability of sensors and actuators to connect things in IoT.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work is financially supported by the Coimbatore
Institute of Technology. The authors would like to
acknowledge Dr.V.Selladurai, Principal, CIT for his
guidance and support throughout the period of this work.
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