Design of smart home system based on WiFi smart plug

This paper presents a low-cost and flexible solution to control and monitor home appliances using Smart Plug devices. The Smart Plug is a power switch which can be accessed via WiFi connection. It integrates two temp sensors, a current sensor and an IR-emitter. Users can plug devices into the Smart Plug to remotely switch power on/off, get information of device's power consumption and ambient temperature, and eventually control the nearby devices using the integrated IR-emitter. There are two ways to access Smart Plug, that is, either connecting it directly in WiFi Ad-Hoc mode or connecting it with a router in WiFi infrastructure mode and accessing online with IP-connectivity. The paper utilizes RESTful based Web services in which the overall system architecture is client/server model and the Web client uses JavaScript and Ajax to transfer data. An Android-based Smartphone application employs standard operations such as Get and Post requests that return responses to communicate between the remote user and the Web server. Depending on the use cases, users can use Smart Plug as lighting switch, timing switch, infrared controller and temp regulator. © 2015 SERSC.