Journal of Robotics, Networking and Artificial Life, Vol. 4, No. 4 (March 2018) 291–294___________________________________________________________________________________________________________Development of Integral Smart Home Appliances
Fengzhi Dai 1*, Yuxing Ouyang 1, Yiqiao Qin 1, Ce Bian 1, Baochang Wei 1, Shengbiao Chang 1, Bo Liu 2
1

College of Electronic Information and Automation, Tianjin University of Science and Technology,
1038 Dagunanlu Road, Hexi District, Tianjin, 300222, China
E-mail: 1* daifz@tust.edu.cn
www.tust.edu.cn
2
Inner Mongolia University, China

Abstract
The integral smart home appliances are developed for monitoring and control the household devices. The WI-FI
module is used for wireless network communication, so as to upload information of all connected smart homeappliances to the server. The home appliances can also be remotely controlled by the external network. The Airkiss
distribution mode is used to connect the WI-FI master module to the network, and to connect to other WI-FI
module devices to adopt the ad hoc network mode for wireless networking.
Keywords: smart home appliance, remote control and monitoring, WI-FI, ad hoc network, Airkiss network

1. Introduction

these devices to the server and receive command fromthe server. The system structure is shown in Fig.1.

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things(IoT) 1, many of the traditional home appliances have
gradually been developed into smart home devices 2,
such as the smart sockets, smart clock, smart closestool,etc.
Compared to the traditional home appliances, thesmart home appliances have the function of monitoring
and control. Since each device needs to be controlled ina different way, it is very difficult to realize theintegrated control of all kinds of home appliances
together by using the network remote control.
To solve this problem, the design focuses on theintegration of smart home appliances. The purpose ofthe design is to create a comfortable, convenient andfast intelligent home living environment 3, so that oursmart home life can be further optimized and improved.
The wireless communication is used to control thedifferent devices, and to upload the collected data from

Fig.1 The system structural block diagram

Just as shown in Fig.1, this design adopts the wirelessad hoc network mode of WI-FI module. So that thelocal WI-FI module can set up the local LAN network,and achieve the purpose of connecting all the smart
home appliances. The WI-FI master module connects tothe server through the Airkiss protocol, which cancontrol and monitor the intelligent household devices.

Copyright © 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).
291

Journal of Robotics, Networking and Artificial Life, Vol. 4, No. 4 (March 2018) 291–294___________________________________________________________________________________________________________In this paper, Section 2 describes the hardware circuitdesign, and Section 3 introduces the function of some
protocols. The experimental results are given in Section
4, and the conclusions are presented in Section 5.

(2) Supports Cloud Server Development / Firmware
and SDK for fast on-chip programming.
(3) Wide temperature range: -40 oC ~ 125 oC.
(4) Operating Voltage: 3.0V ~ 3.6V.
The minimum system circuit diagram of the WI-FI
module is shown in Fig.3.

2. The hardware circuit design
For the hardware circuit design, we use Altium
Designer 4 to draw the schematic. The hardware circuit
is divided into the terminal circuit and equipment circuit.
The terminal circuit is discussed in Section 2-1, andSection 2-2 describes the equipment circuit.
2-1. The terminal circuit
The terminal circuit uses the STM32 chip 5 as themaster chip, which is the Cortex-M3 ARM core and has
144 pins. The chip has 512KB flash memory and 64KBRAM 6. It can download and online debug the program
through SWD or JTAG with KEIL 4, and has thefunction of one-key-download. It has more than 80
general-purpose IO ports, multiple timers and serial
ports. The STM32 minimum system circuit diagram isshown in Fig.2.

Fig.3. WI-FI module minimum system circuit diagram

3. The function of some protocols
A variety of protocols are used to make the function
more perfect. We use ESP8266 built-in TCP/IP protocol
for device network connectivity. And the MESH
protocol is used for the group network, so that theequipment can be communicated each other. Also we
use the Airkiss protocol to configure the network, which
can greatly improve the convenience of theconfiguration.
Section 3-1 describes the MESH protocol, andSection 3-2 introduces the Airkiss protocol.
3-1 Mesh protocols
The design uses a wireless Mesh network 7 for the ad
hoc network communication. In the mesh network
structure, the number can be determined by the numberof nodes.
The relationship between the maximum mountnumbers (L) and the maximum hop numbers (N) can be
expressed as:(1)
L  4 0  41  ...  4 N 1

Fig.2 STM32 minimum system circuit diagram

2-2. The equipment circuit
The equipment circuit uses the ESP8266 WI-FI module
6to realize the function of transmitting data to theterminal equipment and receiving data from the terminalequipment. The control of the device is also realized bythe equipment circuit. The WI-FI module has thefollowing characteristics:(1) A built-in 10-bit high-precision ADC, with acomplete TCP / IP protocol stack.

The system uses the automatic network mode: Assoon as the firmware is downloaded to the module, theWI-FI master module will connect to the router, andthen the router is connected to the WAN. Other
sub-modules will automatically scan around the WI-FI
access points (AP). The WI-FI master module canreceive, transmit and forward data packets, while the292

Journal of Robotics, Networking and Artificial Life, Vol. 4, No. 4 (March 2018) 291–294___________________________________________________________________________________________________________other sub-modules can only receive or send data packets.
The ESP8266 MESH network is shown in Fig.4.

Fig.4 ESP8266 MESH network
Fig.5 terminal device and sub-device

3-2 Airkiss protocols
With the mobile-phone communicational APP WeChat 8,
the WI-FI module of the system can be carried out by
Airkiss distribution network, which makes WI-FI
module access to the Internet.
The principle of the Airkiss distribution network isthat, through the discovery and promiscuous mode of
LAN to get the smart configuration. Since the SDK
programming and the firmware is burned to the WI-FI
module, the WI-FI module can access to the network
through the phone.
The steps of Airkiss smart configuration are asfollows:(1) Scan the two-dimensional (QR) code by WeChat.
(2) Fill the SSID and password in the pop-up
window.
(3) WI-FI master module receives the SSID andpassword, and automatically connects to the router.

4-1 Experiment of communication distanceIn the case of setting up obstacles and without obstacles,
we test the different communication distances betweenthe terminal equipment and the sub-devices.
For each experiment of different communication
distances, we have carried out ten thousands datatransmission. The results of setting and without setting
obstacles are shown in Tab.1 and Tab.2 respectively.
Tab.1 Communication distance – setting obstacle

20 meters

30 meters

40 meters

Number ofexperimental
times

11729

10249

15015

Success rate

100%

99.84%

93.05%

Tab.2 Communication distance - without obstacle

4. Experimental results
Over ten thousands of times, the data transmission
experiments have been done. Section 4-1 shows theexperimental results for the different communication
distances between the terminal device and thesub-device. Section 4-2 shows the experimental results
for the maximum number of hops for mesh networks. A
simplified version of the terminal device and thesub-device is shown in Fig.5.

30 meters

48 meters

90 meters

Number ofexperimentaltimes

10183

10028

10611

Success rate

100%

100%

99.29%

In case of setting obstacles: within 20 meters, no lossof data. For 30 meters distance, the data appears in a293

Journal of Robotics, Networking and Artificial Life, Vol. 4, No. 4 (March 2018) 291–294___________________________________________________________________________________________________________key technologies R & D program of Tianjin(14ZCZDSY00010). It is also supported by the Science& Technology Fund Planning Project of Tianjin HigherSchools (20120831, 20140710-1400020005).

small amount of packet loss. And for 40 meters, more
the data are lost.
In case of no obstacle: within 48 meters there is nodata loss, and the data appears has a small amount ofpacket loss for experiment with 90 meters distance
between the terminal equipment and the sub-devices.

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4-2 Maximum hops test of mesh network
Refered to the official data sheet, we finally set themesh network maximum hop count to 4 jumps. Without
setting the obstacles, the result is shown in Tab.3.
Tab.3 Communication distance - without obstacle

Number of hops

234Distance (m)306090

Success rate (%)

100100100

5. Conclusion
By the test of the smart home devices, the following
data are obtained: The Mesh network allows up to 4
hops, and each mesh-non-leaf node can allow up to 4
direct child nodes to access the network with 100%
success rate. When the transmission distance is within
20 meters, there is no packet loss, and the router can
mount a Mesh network with a network size of 80 nodes.
The above data shows that the device can basicallymeet the needs of smart home appliances integration.
Acknowledgements
The research is partly supported by the Research Fundfor the Reform in Education from Tianjin Municipal
Education Commission of China (171005704B), and the294