ELE Times December 2016 Electronics News in India | Online Electronics Mag | Page 37

Cover Story
Smartphone with different connectivity technologies support has
opened a plethora of use-case in different segments, be it Home
Automation to Smart Cities. With the cost of the mobile phones
going down and new standards coming on the connecitivity
technologies that are part of the mobile phone. Home
automation will have lot of use-case and Smart Lighting is one of
the needs or use case of Smart Home Automation. Smart Lighting
gives flexibility to the user to control the lights using mobile
phone and also helps to reduce power consumption.

Fig.8 LED current linearity in dimming
Android Application Demonstration
As discussed above, there is a dedicated Android Application. The
Application runs on the Smartphones having BLE. The applications
allow the user to select the light appliances and drag and drop on
the screen. Traditionally there was only one master slave BLE
connection supported by the Android Smartphone. This means
that a user can control only one BLE based light with the use of
Smartphone. After the introduction of Android 5.0 Lollipop, the
operating system along with the corresponding hardware started
supporting maximum of 7 master slave BLE connection. This
means that for a small home we would be able to control 7
independent BLE based home appliances such as lights, fans
which a good selling point for the manufacturer. The Android
Application that we developed for our BLE based lighting design
allows 7 connections at the same time. Google Nexus 9 is one of
the tablet which supports the multiple connections and this
feature may vary from the mobile set manufacturer. The Fig.9
below shows the image of the Android Application with the Smart
Lights. As discussed earlier all the above LED lights has the BLE
connectivity support in the hardware. The Android Application
allows the user select the Smart Light, Bulb or Lamp from the
choice as shown Fig.10 and drag and drop the Smart Lights on the
Layout of the home. On the Android Application side the user
needs to make individual connection with each LED lights. Once
the connection is established, the user is able to control each of
the lights.

Fig.10 Application demo with multiple lights
Smart Home Light system is applicable for smart homes and
places where mood lighting and frequent control is required.
Variation in the LED varies lighting experience. Combination of
such lights with integrated control provides a lighting solution for
better user experience. Small PCB size and the Android
application enhances the usability and adoption of Smart Home
Light in the lifestyle segment.
Authors: Jitendra Jain: Technical Leader, AMG Central Lab,
Raunaque Quaiser : Senior Manager, AMG Central Lab, Aman JHA
: Senior Staff Engineer, AMG Central Lab and Ranajay Mallik :
Group Manager, AMG Central Lab

Fig.9 Application demonstration

ELE Times | 37 | December, 2016