Practical, cheap smart home implementation with general purpose embedded hardware Raspberry Pi

With the entire world's knowledge in our pockets, we are living in a world that is already smart. But the dream of a truly smart home still remains incomplete, mainly due to the high level of fragmentation in the industry, leading to countless offerings that don't work together. In this paper, we design a complete system that can make any home smart by using cheap, easily available hardware and open-source, free software. This system can make chosen devices smart regardless of the brand and age, and will enable remote monitoring and control of users' home. It consists of two parts, Raspberry Pi device used as a Linux server on one side and an Android application used as a client on the other side. This model takes into consideration and offers solutions to many current issues in the smart home systems like high costs, security of information, energy efficiency, scalability, and portability.