Development of IoT based network for monitoring appliances

Abstract

The whole world these days are widely dependent on industries to sustain the necessities of the seven billion people that inhabit the planet and all the industries want to become automated to achieve maximum efficiency. A number of factors determine the level of productivity in an industry. However, the production level does not increase to great extent due to several drawbacks. One of the vital issues that are faced by the industries is that the machine lifetime reduces due to the lack of persistent observation of the appliances. There can be fatigue failure, tolerance failure, and aging failure in instruments. As a result, the industry faces equipment based losses such as Unplanned Stops, Planned Stops, Small Stops, Slow Cycles, Production Rejects, and Startup Rejects. Manual supervising of equipment was prevalent earlier but the effectiveness of this approach was not up to the mark. A solution to this problem would be monitoring the condition of the appliances constantly using the internet which allows access to data from anywhere in the world. We will be attempting to implement such a mechanism which will allow data from the machine end to be observed and controlled from remote locations using the internet. As a test system we will set up two appliances which will be three light bulbs. We will take into account current flowing through the appliance. Then, we will collect this information from the equipment by varying the load where light bulbs will act as a load and gather the named data. To transfer data to and from the server, we will use mainly two protocols which are MQTT and HTTP. In HTTP protocol, the IP addressing must be held in mind as a dissimilar IP may prevent the machine from interacting with the server, so a real IP is needed at that moment. MQTT is the most popular protocol for IoT and thus we will implement in our project. In MQTT protocol, the issue of changing the IP address with the change of devices can be solved easily. As publish-subscribe-based messaging protocol, it provides one-to-many distribution of messages. Furthermore, it is ideal for use in restricted environments such as Machine to Machine (M2M) communication and Internet of Things (IoT) contexts where a tiny code footprint is needed. Thus, for efficacious execution of our project MQTT protocol is better than HTTP protocol. In addition, the data will be stored in the database on the server. Upon our desire, we can send commands from the server to control the bulbs. The command will be read using microcontroller and it will automatically turn off the light bulbs. Lastly, as smartphones are widely in use these days, we have created a mobile application named “pahara” which will fetch data from the server and as a result we can easily observe the data from anywhere at any time.