How to add intelligence to our homes? - Part 2

This is the long overdue update of the house project conceptualized a while back with my kids.  In this project, a model house was wired for simple lighting using LED's.

 

The USB home

Each part or room in the model house will be lit by a dedicated LED and each LED will be directly connected to the pins of the microcontroller, in this case, the Arduino Uno.

 

The Arduino Uno wired using a recycled IDE cable

The Arduino being wired

The Arduino will act as a hardware controller/driver to power up the LED's but commands will come from a PC.  This whole architecture can be ported to a real, full sized house and control is not limited to lighting only but for the purposes of demonstration, the model house should be sufficient to illustrate.

The GUI in a Windows PC



The GUI showing the check boxes and sliders as control inputs

The model home is connected to the PC via the USB port.  The Uno will function as a slave unit with the PC as the master.  If a user clicks on the GUI, the corresponding LED will light up (or toggle off) in the actual model home.  This therefore illustrates how a real USB controlled home can be made possible.

How to add intelligence to our homes?

Smart homes were science fiction stuff back decades ago.  With the advances in technology these days, the demand for smarter homes become more and more.  With a little bare engineering, we will try to model a house with lighting that can be controlled via a USB port, creating a "smart home" appeal.  Because the technology is available using microcontrollers, we will be able to deploy the system in a very cost efficient scenario.  The goal again is not to re-invent but rather to create something with bare engineering and still have fun along the way.

We will start with the model house built by the kids above.  It has a garage, a kitchen, a bedroom, toilet and a little living space.  The project will be to light this model house using LED's.  The LED's will be controlled via software in a PC. 

How to make it possible:
1.  Model house - need decorations...
2.  LED's controlled by Arduino Uno
3.  PC with application software written in VB
4.  The PC will communicate with the Arduino via USB to trigger light switching
5.  Target completion - within Dec 2013  :-)