Implementing Smart Homes with Open Source Solutions

A Smart home provides living environment with comfortable, convenient, energy saving, safety and health care place to people live in. From technology viewpoint, its core is information system with physical manipulation capability which is referred as cyber physical system. Most of such systems available currently are proprietary products which put end users in risk of some issues such as long term support, system compatibility and cost. To address such issues, an approach with emerging open source solutions was discussed. The core of the proposed open source system is Arduino platform. A module for performing functions to implement smart homes also proposed in this paper. It is a typical cyber physical system and consists of input, output and energy monitoring functions. The detail of this module is presented and discussed.