Arduino based Smart Home Automation System

Around the World massive quantities of energy are consumed in residential buildings leading to a negative impact on the environment. Also, the number of wireless connected devices in use around the World is constantly and rapidly increasing, leading to potential health risks due to over exposer to electromagnetic radiation. An opportunity appears to reduce the energy consumption in residential buildings by introducing smart home automation systems. Multiple such solutions are available in the market with most of them being wireless, so the challenge is to design such systems that would limit the quantity of newly generated electromagnetic radiation. For this we look at several wired, serial communication methods and we successfully test such a method using a simple protocol to exchange data between an Arduino microcontroller board and a Visual C# app running on a Windows computer. We aim to show that if desired, smart home automation systems can still be built using simple viable alternatives to wireless communication.