1.0 Abstract

The task at hand was to build a Smart Home System, emphasizing more towards smart control rather than remote control of the special features in the house. The system to be developed must function in a way where the many different features and devices in the house can be controlled from anywhere around the house and to a certain radius outside the house. Thus, TCP/IP connections will be put to use for good consistency.

2.0 Acknowledgement

I would like to thank a number of people who helped me complete this assignment. First of all, my lecturer Mr.Syed who choose to guide us with support and compassion and at the same time not spoon feeding us . It was a wonderful learning experience in each tutorial classes as we got to experiment ourselves with our creativity before being taught the correct way to develop certain parts of the system. Besides that, I must also thank few seniors from my course who were kind enough to share their knowledge at times of doubt. Lastly, the support forum of National Instruments official webpage was of extreme help as most of solutions to the problems I encountered while completing the assignment could be found there.

3.0 Introduction

Labview programs are also known as virtual instruments as the way the system works emulates actual physical instruments. It is a totally different approach to programming compared to common programming languages such as Java or C because Labview uses a graphical programming environment with ease of drag and drop features. Although Labview was initially released for the Apple Macintosh in 1986, current labview supports and is compatible and can be used in many different platforms such as Windows, Mac OS or even Linux. Labview is mostly used for data acquisition, instrument control, and industrial automation. Labview files have the extension “.vi”, which is an abbreviation for “Virtual Instrument”. LabVIEW offers lots of additional Add-Ons and Toolkits.

For this assignment, all the basic concepts of Labview and certain algorithms have been put to place in the process to complete the system. Although there was a floor plan provided at the assignment question, it was decided to create a different floor plan with all the minimum basic requirement according to the developers creativity. The user of the system would be able to control most devices in the house through remote control and some parts of the devices through smart features such as temperature change in the refrigerator according to time of the day and automatically switching on air-conditioning. The system was developed thoroughly using only Labview2010 without the use of any external coding languages. Two different VI’s were used namely the Client VI and the Server VI. The client provides an input interface for the user whereas the server processes and produces an output according to user input. The Client and Server VI’s were able to be connected through a certain networking protocol known as TCP/IP. The most notable among many features in the system

are the addition of automated lights, curtains and doors. Besides, there is also the inclusion of auto temperature detection and alarm systems together with the inclusion of video players.

4.0 Features and Advantages of Labview2010

4.1 Dataflow Programming

The programming language used in Labview, is a dataflow programming language. It is capable of parallel execution. Multi-processing and multi-threading hardware is automatically used by the built-in system. Execution is determined by the structure of a graphical block diagram on which the developer connects different function-nodes by drawing wires. These wires transmit variables and any node can execute as soon as all its input data become available.

4.2 Graphical Programming

Labview joins the creation of user interfaces known as front panels into the development cycle. Labview programs are called virtual instruments (VIs). Each VI has three components: a block diagram, a front panel, and a connector panel. The connector panel is used to represent the VI in the block diagrams of other incoming Vis. The graphical approach also allows non-programmers to build programs simply by dragging and dropping virtual representations of lab equipment with which they are already familiar. The LabVIEW programming environment, with the included examples and the documentation, makes it simple to create small applications.