Low Cost Automation System for Smart Houses based on PIC Microcontrollers

The high electricity bills of houses have triggered a significant research for solutions to mitigate this issue. The house automation systems offer everything necessary to put an end to these inconveniences as, most often, they incorporate a number of smart devices (microcontrollers and sensors). The presented work outlines the development of a microcontroller-based automation system of a solar smart house using automatic lighting and thermal comfort sensors (temperature, humidity) and safety functions (gas leakage, smoke detection). This system is based on PIC microcontrollers and is applied through the implementation of a complete algorithm. The program is written on Micro C, and in order to realize the control circuit and the simulation, the testing software made use of Proteus software which is freely available from the Internet. The control of temperature and air pollution was implemented using the PIC16F877A, while the light control was applied with the PIC18F4550. The hardware prototype was also provided to experiment on the designed control strategy. The results of this work allowed some conclusions to be reached and confirmed the benefits of this kind of automation systems.