Home Appliances as Home Controllers: Concepts and Set-Top Box Implementation

In this paper we present a novel softwarebased home control platform suitable as an extension to digital home appliances that are equipped with a CPU (settop boxes, home theatre systems, TV sets, gaming consoles, etc). By using an appliance they are already accustomed to, users become able to control lights, appliances and media playback in their homes. Intelligence and awareness are achieved with a support for execution of recipes – preprepared scripts that define timely actions and respond to triggers obtained from sensors. Software abstraction layer facilitates integration of any desired communication protocol. In our prototype, we supported Zigbee and DMX for light control, X10 for light/appliances control over power line, as well as Ethernet-based optical cameras as motion/presence sensors and UPnP/DLNA based equipment for distributed media playback.