Smart Frame - A Location Sensing Picture Frame using IOT

International Journal on Recent and Innovation Trends in Computing and Communication ISSN: 2321-8169
Volume: 5 Issue: 8 235 – 239
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235
IJRITCC | August 2017, Available @ http://www.ijritcc.org
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Smart Frame - A Location Sensing Picture Frame using IOT
Dr D Durga Bhavani
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
CVR College of Engineering (Autonomous)
Hyderabad, India
Email: drddurgabhavani@gmail.com
Nithin Kumar Panjala
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
CVR College of Engineering (Autonomous)
Hyderabad, India
Email: nithin15chinnu@gmail.com
Abstract—To make communication easier, We have created a IOT Location Sensing Picture Frame. A decorative item which acts smart to tell
the user the location of their family member. Each family member has a photo of themselves in the picture frame. Each photo has a
corresponding strip of lights that is controlled by an app which runs in the background of the designated family member‘s smart phone. The
lights are programmed to display colors in a spectrum ranging from red to green. Even the app is designed in such a way that a panic alert can be
sent to the emergency contact and alert will be depicted in the photo frame with red lights and a buzzer.
Keywords-Smart Frame, Location Sensing, Internet of things, Nodemcu Wi-fi Module, ThingSpeak, Android App Development.
__________________________________________________*****_________________________________________________
I. INTRODUCTION
This paper presents a helpful user friendly location sensing
frame with an application that runs in the background capturing
the location of the person with the help of a smart phone. The
application ―Smart Frame‖ needs to be installed in the smart
phone of the person in order to track the location of the person
using location sensor and GPS. All the details of the person like
photo frame number in the device, emergency contact and
locations can be set using the app. The device acts dynamically
it can be connected to the router. The introduced method uses a
cloud platform to store the location co-ordinates of the person
and send the color code as input to the picture frame which
depicts varies lights depending upon the location of the person.
Another useful feature of this picture frame is its ability to
communicate when family members have arrived at specific
locations that can be updated on their phones. Let‘s say you are
going out of station and arriving at a specific bus or train
station, you can set that location on your smart phone as far in
advance as you like, and the picture frame will change the color
of your lights to blue when you arrive.
II. RELATED WORK
A. Sensing Human Activity :GPS Tracking in Netherlands
The enhancement of GPS technology enables the use of
GPS devices not only as navigation and orientation tools, but
also as instruments used to capture travelled routes: as sensors
that measure activity on a city scale or the regional scale. TU
Delft developed a process and database architecture for
collecting data on pedestrian movement in three European city
centers, Norwich, Rouen and Koblenz, and in another
experiment for collecting activity data of 13 families in Almere
(The Netherlands) for one week. The question posed is: what is
the value of GPS as ‗sensor technology‘ measuring activities of
people? The conclusion is that GPS offers a widely useable
instrument to collect invaluable spatial-temporal data on
different scales and in different settings adding new layers of
knowledge to urban studies, but the use of GPS-technology and
deployment of GPS-devices still offers significant challenges
for future research [1, 2, and 9].
B. Wireless LAN Location Sensing for Security Applications
in Houston, Texas
They considered the problem of using wireless LAN
location sensing for security applications. Bayesian methods
have been successfully used to determine location from
wireless LAN signals, but such methods have the drawback
that a model must first be built from training data. The
introduction of model error can drastically reduce the
robustness of the location estimates and such errors can be
actively induced by malicious user‘s intent on hiding their
location. They provided a technique for increasing robustness
in the face of model error and experimentally validate this
technique by testing against hardware, modulation of power
levels, and the placement of devices outside the trained
workspace. Their results have interesting ramifications for
location privacy in wireless networks [3, 10].
C. TrackMe – location tracking system in Trivandrum,India
Tracking of locations of a mobile object or person
continuously using smart phones using conventional Global
Positioning System (GPS) puts a huge toll on the battery life of
power-limited smart phones. The power consumption of a GPS
unit is much more than any other sensors in a smart phone.
Worse, the GPS unit cannot be switched off even if the smart
phone is in sleep mode. GPS, in addition, is not effective in

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indoor locations because suitable number of satellites cannot be
obtained for acceptable communication. So they proposed a
low power and low cost fast location tracking system for a
smart phone device which continuously tracks the locations of
a moving device with accuracy. The inbuilt sensors of a smart
phone like the accelerometer, the magnetometer and the
gyroscope have been utilized, instead of the costly GPS unit, to
track the continuous locations of a mobile device [4, 7, and 8].
III. SMART FRAME – LOCATON SENSING PICTURE FRAME
Mostly people are worried about the safety of their family
members who goes to distant places on daily bases to perform
their jobs or to attend their college sessions. The family
members at home have no clear idea if the person has reached
their destination or not until they call them up and enquiry.
Sometimes it would not be possible for the person to inform the
family due to work busy. Family members are worried of the
person‘s safety. To encounter this problem, we came up with
an idea of this location sensing picture frame. Without
disturbing the privacy of the person, this frame helps in
providing the location of the person with the help of led lights.
In order to provide security, a panic alert option is provided in
the app which helps in sending a danger alert with location of
the person to the emergency contact and an alert to the frame in
home. We also surveyed many people from different sectors to
understand the effectiveness of the problem.
TABLE I. SURVEY.
Name Profession Do you
face this
problem?
Review
Mr.
Suman
Software Yes Sometimes, due
to the traffic. It‘s
tough to pick calls
and tell mother
about my delay.
Engineer
Ms.
Shobha
Home
maker
Yes It is a useful
decorative item
Ms.
Naveena
Btech
student
Yes It would be
helpful for my
parents to knew
about my location
IV. ARCHITHECTURE OF SMART FRAME
Generally, our product is operated using a Nodemcu Wi-Fi
module which is embedded with the photo frame. The Led
Lights are connected to the nodemcu board. The board is
programmed in such a way that it receives the command from
the ThingSpeak cloud platform and performs the operation in
order to depict the light in the Led strip. The cloud is updated
with the location of the person and the command from the
smart phone.
Figure 1. Architecture of smart frame.
A. ESP8266 NODEMCU :
An open source filmware and development kit that helps
you to prototype IOT product. Features are open-source,
interactive, programmable, low cost, simple, smart, WI-FI
enabled. Advanced API for hardware IO, which can
dramatically reduce the redundant work for configuring and
manipulating hardware. Code like Arduino but interactively in
Lua script. Event-driven API for network applications, which
facilitates developers writing code running on a 5mm*5mm,
sized MCU in Nodejs style. Greatly speed up your IOT
application developing process. Less than $2 WI-FI MCU
ESP8266 integrated and easy to prototyping development kit.
We provide the best platform for IOT application development
at the lowest cost. The Development Kit based on ESP8266,
integrates GPIO, PWM, IIC, 1-Wire and ADC all in one board.
Power your development in the fastest way combining with
NodeMcu Firmware.
The Wi-Fi module setup code along with the LED lights
and buzzer code is entered in the board. The Wi-Fi module up
on receiving the commands from the cloud, the code runs and
the respective led strip is set on to the corresponding color
command [5] .
B. WS2801 LED Strip :
This is some of the highest quality WS2801 LED lighting
available. Constructed on an extremely high quality white
flexible PCB, these strips contain 32 WS2801 ICs and 32 high
quality SMD5050 RGB LEDs per meter. These LED strips
speak a SPI protocol, and can easily be driven by Arduino, PIC,
and ARM microcontrollers!

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 The basic specs for these strips are:
 32 SMD5050 RGB LEDs per meter, with 32 WS2801
ICs (each LED is individually addressable).
 IP67 waterproof, with a silicon jacket around the strip.
 5V operation.
 Strips can be cut every LED (1 IC, 1 LED per segment)
 White PCB.
 These strips take data in the standard red, green, blue
order [6].
C. Arduino IDE :
The Arduino Integrated Development Environment - or
Arduino Software (IDE) - contains a text editor for writing
code, a message area, a text console, a toolbar with buttons for
common functions and a series of menus. It connects to the
Arduino and Genuino hardware to upload programs and
communicate with them
The Arduino Software (IDE) uses the concept of a
sketchbook: a standard place to store programs (or sketches).
The sketches in the sketchbook can be opened from the File>
Sketchbook menu or from the Open button on the toolbar. The
first time run the Arduino software, it will automatically create
a directory for sketchbook. We can view or change the location
of the sketchbook location from with the Preferences dialog.
It allows us to manage sketches with more than one file
(each of which appears in its own tab). These can be normal
Arduino code files (no visible extension), C files (.c extension),
C++ files (.cpp), or header files (.h).
The code is uploaded into nodemcu board with the help of
this Arduino ide, setting the appropriate values to board, CPU
frequency, Flash size, upload speed and port [11].
D. ThingSpeak Cloud :
ThingSpeak is an IOT analytics platform service that allows
us to aggregate, visualize and analyze live data streams in the
cloud. ThingSpeak provides instant visualizations of data
posted by our devices to ThingSpeak. With the ability to
execute MATLAB® code in ThingSpeak we can perform
online analysis and processing of the data as it comes in.
Some of the key capabilities of ThingSpeak include the
ability to:
Easily configure devices to send data to ThingSpeak using
popular IOT protocols.
 Visualize your sensor data in real-time.
 Aggregate data on-demand from third-party sources.
 Use the power of MATLAB to make sense of your
IOT data.
 Run your IOT analytics automatically based on
schedules or events.
 Prototype and build IOT systems without setting up
servers or developing web software.
 Automatically act on your data and communicate using
third-party services like Twilio® or Twitter®.
ThingSpeak cloud is used to store all the details of the user like
location, emergency contact and frame number. It provides API
keys to upload and retrieve the values from the cloud. As a
single photo frame may contain 2 or more pictures of family
members, each person has a separate channel in the cloud.
Talkback is another service provided by the ThingSpeak
platform. It helps in receiving and forwarding the commands
from the smart phone to the nodemcu. All the commands that
are sent from the smart phone by calculating are saved in the
talkback and forwarded to the smart frame [12].
E. Thunkable Android App Builder :
Thunkable is a drag and drop platform for building native
and mobile apps. We can design our Beautiful App with native
user interface components that feature Material Design
elements-- and even add our own custom Fonts (.ttfs). We can
also capture or select from our favorite images with the Camera
and ImagePicker components and we can also automatically
add emotions and captions to them with the use the Microsoft
Emotion and Image Recognizer. We can add Sharing to our
apps or build our own Messaging App adding fun services like
Google Voice Recognizer and Text-to-Speech, and Yandex
Translate. We can invent a robust Mapping App for our
business or community powered by our Google Maps and
Location Sensor components. It allows storing things locally
and on the cloud with Tiny DB, Firebase DB, Cloudinary DB
and more.
It provides an inbuilt map interface as a component in the
services. It makes the developing of application easier by
providing a way to write the algorithm to calculate the distance
of the person from his destination [13].
V. PROPOSED ALGORITHM
Initialize the device by connecting it to the 5v power supply.
The Wi-Fi module needs to be connected to the router, all the
LED lights in the frame turns to light color indicating the
activation of device.
 START the device.
 Connect to the Wi-Fi router.
 Enter the ―frame number‖ and ―emergency contact‖ in
the application.
 Set home location and work location.
 When you are in danger click ‗PANIC‘ button.
 If you are busy then touch ‗BUSY‘ button.
 If you are on a vacation, set the starting point and
destination using ―On a Vacation!‖ button.
 STOP
Depending on the location of the person, the distance of the
person is calculated and a color code is sent to the device via

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cloud. Up on receiving the color code from the cloud, device
depicts the color in the frame accordingly.
VI. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The proposed system device is more user friendly. It uses the
variation of lights to show the nearness of the person in the
frame. Replacing the Intel Edison board with nodemcu reduces
the cost of the product and makes it cheaper.
Figure 2.Chart showing the updation of home location in cloud.
The figure 2, shows how the latitude and longitude co-
ordinates of the location are stored in the cloud. Each person
has a home location, work location, source location, destination
location and emergency contact fields in the cloud which can
be monitored. They are used in calculating the person‘s
distance from the respective locations by tracking the location
of the person using location sensor through app in the
smartphone.
Figure 3. Screenshots showing Functional requirements like emergency
contact, lcoation to be set by the person.
The figure 3, shows few screenshots of the application. It asks
for the frame number, emergency contact to save in the cloud.
The locations required are set by using a marker in the map.
If the person is in any danger situation, he can
intimate it by shaking the phone thrice or by clicking panic
button. On clicking the button, an alert will be sent to the
emergency contact and all the LED lights in his/her frame will
be turned to red and a buzzer sound is made indicating that the
person is in danger.
Figure 4. Screenshot of the alert message sent to the emergency contact
The figure 4, shows the screenshot of the alert message sent
to the emergency contact. The message consists of text asking
for help and the exact location of the person, so that the person
can be tracked easily.
VII. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
This proposed work is successfully designed, implemented
and tested. Our product helps in knowing the location of the
person without disturbing the privacy of the person and
without contacting through a call. As the variation in lights can
be seen by naked eye and a minimum knowledge about in
identifying the lights is enough to make use of this device.
This simplicity of the product makes it user friendly and even
making the uneducated people easily access the device. This
system has high practical value and cost efficient. This work is
having a wide scope. A mobile application which can be
further modified using good graphical interface and a function
to send voice commands to the device as a message.
Embedding a led screen with the device helps to make it
display updated pictures of the person with his permission. In
case of panic alert, the exact location of the person can also be
shown in the frame along with the map.
REFERENCES
[1] Sensing Human Activity: GPS Tracking Stefan van der Spek,
Jeroen van Schaick, Peter de Bois and Remco de Haan
‖Sensors 2009, 9, 3033-3055; doi:10.3390/s90403033‖.
[2] Shoval, N. Tracking technologies and urban analysis. Cities
2008, 25, 21-28.
[3] Wireless LAN Location-Sensing for Security Applications.
[4] TrackMe – A Low Power Location Tracking System Using
Smart Phone Sensors,‖ 2015 Intl. Conference on Computing
and Network Communications (CoCoNet'15), Dec. 16-19,
2015, Trivandrum, India‖
[5] http://nodemcu.com/index_en.html
[6] https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-WS2801-Library.
[7] NirupamaBulusu, John Heidemann, Deborah Estrin
University of Southern California / Information Sciences
Institute Marina del Rey, CA 90292 bulusu, johnh, ―GPS-less

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Low Cost Outdoor Localization For Very Small Devices‖,
Personal Communications, IEEE7.5 (2000): pp.28-34.
[8] P. Bahl and V. N. Padmanabhan, ―Radar: An in-building rf-
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[9] Ahas, R.; Ular, M. Location services - new challenges for
planning and public administration? Futures 2005, 37, 547-
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[10] P. Bahl and V. N. Padmanabhan. Enhancements to the
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[11] https://www.arduino.cc/en/Reference/HomePage.
[12] https://in.mathworks.com/help/thingspeak/ .
[13] https://thunkable.com/explore/ .

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Smart Frame - A Location Sensing Picture Frame using IOT