Sim DO M O TI CS

DOMOTICS (DOMus infOrmaTICS) means information technology in the home (domus is Latin for home). Although remote lighting and appliance control have been used for years, domotics is another term for the digital home, including the networks and devices that add comfort and convenience as well as security. Controlling heating, air conditioning, food preparation, TVs, stereos, lights, appliances, entrance gates and security systems all fall under the domotics umbrella. DOMOTICS is a field within building automation, specializing in the specific automation requirements of private homes and in the application of automation techniques for the comfort and security of its residents. Although many techniques used in building automation (such as light and climate control, control of doors and window shutters, security and surveillance systems, etc.) are also used in home automation, additional functions in home automation can include the control of multi-media home entertainment systems, automatic plant watering and pet feeding, automatic scenes for dinners and parties, and a more user-friendly control interface. When home automation is installed during construction of a new home, usually control wires are added before the interior walls are installed. These control wires run to a controller, which will then control the environment. Specific domotic standards include X10 (electrical wiring), IRDA (infrared), ZigBee (radio frequency), Bluetooth (radio frequency) etc. Some standards use communication and control wiring, some embed signals in the power line, some use radio frequency (RF) signals, and some use a combination of several methods. Control wiring is hardest to retrofit into an existing house. Some appliances include USB that is used to control it and connect it to a domotics network.

In extreme installations, rooms can sense not only the presence of a person but know who that person is and perhaps set appropriate lighting, temperature and music/TV taking into account day of week, time of day, and other factors.

Other automated tasks may include setting the air conditioning to an energy saving setting when the house is unoccupied, and restoring the normal setting when an occupant is about to return. More sophisticated systems can maintain an inventory of products, recording their usage through an RFID tag, and prepare a shopping list or even automatically order replacements. Some practical implementations of home automation are for example when an alarm detects a fire or smoke condition, then all lights in the house will blink to alert occupants. If the house is equipped with a home theater, a home automation system can shut down all audio and video components to alert the user to a possible fire or a burglar.

Objective and Scope: Due to lack of infrastructure, our project is targeted at simulating DOMOTICS at real time. The only thing that is going to be missing from this implementation is expensive gadgets and other infrastructural prerequisites considering the monitory feasibility. SimDOMOTICS will control devices (simulated) connected to the home PC from a remote location via internet. It permits you to access home appliances (simulated) within your home pc without compromising security. It pays utmost importance to security, therefore does not provide a direct access from a public network. Rather it accesses your home pc files through a public mailing system. We use GMail SMTP/POP3/IMAP servers to achieve these feats. SimDOMOTICS therefore is a faster, secure, economic way to remotely control your electronic gadgets at home through your home pc from any part of the world. There are 3 modules involved in this project:

Home PC Module It is here that you configure all your electronic home gadgets that you intend to control remotely. It constantly monitors the GMail POP3 server for new commands in form of email. If it detects a command email, it fetches it and processes it. In other words you could control your devices from any part of the world using your telephone. J2EE Server Side Module This is from where the commands to control received from the web site are routed. The commands received here are redirected to the GMail SMTP server as command emails directed to the appropriate email id of the registered user (this has to be a GMail account), which will be later received by the Home PC Module and processed. Web Site Module It is here a new user registers and adds information about the devices at home that needs to be controlled. Registered users can login and issue commands from a remote location to control their devices Only prerequisites needed to run this software is a fast broadband internet connection at both ends the sending and receiving, a java enabled system and email ids with GMail. We use GMail because GMail provides us with an open SMTP/POP3/IMAP server access. It is not easy to break into the GMail mailing system because they have inherent security features incorporated into it. This gives you fool proof remote access solution to access your electronic gadgets at home. Technologies: JFC, JDBC, IO Streams, Sockets, Threads, J2EE (JavaMail, Servlets, JSP), Embedded system, Prerequisites: Fast broadband internet, couple of email ids with GMail, J2EE Application Server, and JRE (Java Runtime Environment), PIC integrated kit.

*Project Development Environment:

Hardware
Pentium IV Processor 512 MB RAM

40GB HDD 1024 * 768 Resolution Color Monitor

Software
Windows NT/XP/2003 Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) 1.6 NetBeans 6.0 IDE MySQL Server Apache Tomcat Server (J2EE Application Server) Web Browser

*Note: This is not System Requirements.