Smart Building Prototype using PIC18F4550

Smarts buildings are valuable for today organizations. They not only save energy, water and operational cost, but also improve security, event response time, and bring the benefit of decreasing pollution in the environment. This paper describes the implementation of a prototype for a smart building system to control switches and monitor different analogical and digital sensors widely used in similar systems. Each data acquisition module of this system is composed of a PIC18F4550 microcontroller with different sensors attached to a board and can manipulate electronic circuit peripherals for measuring physical variables in the environment. The PICkit2 application and the USB.c library were used to program the microcontroller for communication through the USB port. The PC interface program was implemented in Visual Basic with HID native API for communication through the USB port. SQL server was used to implement a database to collect data from data acquisition modules. A web server and a web application interface were implemented using ASP.NET technology to remotely control peripheral devices over TCP/IP protocol. The implemented prototype smart building system can be used in each room of the building to control and monitor temperature, relative humidity, atmospheric pressure sensors, motion detector, smoke detector and luminosity intensity detector and to detect the status of a switch to turn on a light bulb, radio, fun, or any electro domestic device. In conclusion, powerful and versatile information technology based on client/server and web technology was used to implement a prototype smart building providing an efficient and cost effective solution to the current market.