Design and Implementation of a Housekeeper System

Controlling home appliances through network, as one hot topic in the Internet of Things, can provide a way of convenient remote control of home applications. It will greatly improve the user experience and free users from the tedious and redundant controlling actions. In addition, the potential of home appliances network also reflected in the home security and energy conserving and environment protective. Since remote control and user authentication can effectively help to guarantee the home security and a centralized device control is more effective to reduce energy consumption and waste of resources. "My Private Housekeeper" is a novel network-based appliance control system. In this paper, by taking several popular household appliances as example, we describe the system design and implementation in details. Using the Atom platform as the control center, our system can remotely and locally control equipments on real time through wireless technology and voice interface. The mechanism used on mobile platform, which is connected to the Internet, is similar to instant messaging. The voice control part is based on MST omnidirectional microphone, which can capture sound signal within a radius of 5 meters, and keep sound quality for speech recognition. This system uses the XML-based device description and control protocol, which was designed and developed by our group, to implement device self-describing and control information response.