Smart Home
One of the more popular applications of the Internet of Things is the Smart Home. A collection of sensors, controllers, and circuits, connecting things around your home to each other and the Internet, allows you to read data and control them from an app on your smartphone.
A home IoT solution can control appliances (such as lighting, heating, cooling, washing machines, coffee machines, etc.), devices, such as entertainment systems, and passive objects, including water taps, windows, and doors. Sensors around the home can provide security by sending alerts to your smartphone or automatically activating corrective measures if any threats are detected, such as unauthorized access, gas leaks, smoke, fire, water leakage, etc.
Home owners can receive data on or send control signals from the mobile app from close proximity (when the resident is at home) using the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocol or remotely (when the resident is away from home) over the Internet using WiFi and MQTT protocols.
In this project, you will be building and programming simple versions of circuits that are used in smart homes. We will add sensors to detect various parameters of your home, such as temperature, humidity, gas, motion, and soil moisture, and controllers to switch lightbulbs on and off and change the speed of a motor.
A Kitchen Sink Project
When learning computing technology, the most basic project is by convention a solution to display the phrase "Hello World". On the other end is what is referred to as a Kitchen Sink Project. The term comes from the English phrase "everything but the kitchen sink" which means almost everything one can think of.
Such projects are often an integration of individual small solutions used for learning or demonstrations.
This project uses many of the solutions covered in the Micro Circuits projects, and some other solutions, and shows how they can all be connected togther to provide a complete IoT solution.