Voice Activated Power Sockets (Home Automation)

The main idea is to make the interfacing between the computer and the micro-controller board wireless. It is important to know that there are quite a lot of very cheap different types of off-the-shelf wireless modules available. Many of these modules provide simple serial communication protocol the RS232 over a wireless protocol. For an example, such Bluetooth module can provide serial communication over Bluetooth protocol. Similarly modules providing Serial communication protocol over Wifi and RF are also available. Let's take an example of Bluetooth protocol for making the home automation system wireless.

1) For the micro-controller board: You can get one of the Bluetooth modules with Serial interface and connect the RX, TX and GND pins to the micro-controller serial interface pins. You need to take care of the voltage levels while interfacing with the micro-controller or a micro-controller board, most of these wireless modules can work with 5 or 3.3V.

2) For a PC you could use a Bluetooth-USB dongle that emulates serial port over Bluetooth. This means when you connect the dongle to your PC, it will show up as a Serial/COM port. Then it is quite simple, you can use the same 'C' application and same speech recognition software as mentioned in this project to send command to the Bluetooth dongle via the emulated COM port thus making this home automation system wireless. Very simple.

I leave it upto you to find out various ways to control this home automation system with countless Bluetooth enabled devices.

Additionally in order to make the design even safer (with respect to dealing with the 230V AC supply) I added a second relay. The reason is that if I had used the on-board relay full 230V AC would be arriving on the relay terminals on the board. Instead a second relay is driven using the relay that is on the board. As you can see in the images the on-board relay is orange in color whereas the second relay is separate to the board and has Red tape over it. So whenever the relay on the board is driven it provides supply to the external relay turning the second relay ON or OFF.

I strongly believe in not "re-inventing the wheel" therefore most of the components that I have used are off-the-shelf (Hw/Sw both). This enables anybody to create this project very quickly without requiring in depth technical knowledge about electronic circuits and without worrying about the complexity of speech recognition.

This project is more of an innovation hobby project. The components that I required to build a basic speech recognition based home automation system were a speech recognition software, a PC or an embedded computer with an internal or external microphone to run the speech recognition software, an electronic circuit to control the power to an electrical appliance or a gadget.

1) Please note that since this project involves controlling of electrical appliances running at very high voltage (230V AC), please do so carefully and at your own risk.

2) All the instructions and code are provided "as is", please follow/use them at your own risk, I will not be liable for anything what so ever.

3) Also please let me inform you that I do not have any tie-up with the vendors that I have mentioned below from whom I have acquired, obtained, purchased various software and hardware components, nor do I receive any commission from them. These components carry license agreements from the vendors. Please adhere to their respective license agreements.