2014 International Conference on Reliability, Optimization and Information Technology ICROIT 2014, India, Feb 6-8 2014

Raspberry Pi based Interactive

Home Automation System through E-mail
Sarthak Jain, Anant Vaibhav, Lovely Goyal
Student member, IEEE,
Dept. of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Technology
Delhi - 110086, India
[email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

Abstract- Home automation is becoming more and more popular

developed a Java based home automation system. The use of

Java technology, which incorporates built-in network security
features, produces a secure solution. However, the system
requires an intrusive and expensive wired installation and the
use of a high end Pc. Baudel et at (1993) proposed a novel
control network, using hand gestures. The controller uses a
glove to relay hand gestures to the system. Ardam et at (1998)
introduced a phone based remote controller for home and office
automation. The system differs in that all communications
occur over a fixed telephone line and not over the Internet. The
system can be accessed using any telephone that supports dual
tone multiple frequency (DTMF).

day by day due to its numerous advantages. This can be achieved

by local networking or by remote control. This paper aims at
designing a basic home automation application on Raspberry Pi
through reading the subject of E-mail and the algorithm for the
same has been developed in python environment which is the
default programming environment provided by Raspberry Pi.
Results show the efficient implementation of proposed algorithm
for home automation. LEDs were used to indicate the switching
action.

Key Words -Raspberry Pi, E-mail, Home Automation, Python.

The research available into home automation in public

domain lies predominantly in the academic arena, with little
industrial research being available in open literature. The
adoption of home automation technologies into commercial
systems has been limited, and where available consumer uptake
has been slow. The aforementioned systems offer little in the
way of interoperability. Attempts have been made to provide
network interoperability and remote access to home automation
systems through the development of home gateways. Kushirio
et at (1998) proposed a home energy management focused
home gateway, which connects the home network with the
Internet. The system was installed in twenty houses in the Tokyo
area. Saito et at (2000) defined a home gateway as the point of
ingress between a personal area network and a public access
network. Yoon et at (2008) implements a home gateway that
accepts mobile phone signals and activates or deactivates an
LED representing a home device. Ok et at (2006) proposed a
home gateway based on the OSGI (Open Service Gateway
Initiative), which allows service providers to access home
automation systems for administration and maintenance
services. These systems have made a significant contribution to
the development of a home gateway. However, the existing
network infrastructure within the home environment has not
been taken into consideration when selecting the networks for
integration with the respective home gateways.

I. INTRODUCTION
Home automation refers to the application of computer and
information technology for control of home appliances and
domestic features. Its application varies from simple remote
control of lighting to complex computer/micro-controller based
networks involving varying degrees of intelligence and
automation. Home automation results in convenience, energy
efficiency, and safety benefits leading to improved quality of
life.
The popularity of network enabled home automation has
been increasing greatly in recent years due to simplicity and
much higher affordability. Moreover, with the rapid expansion
of the Internet, there is the potential for the remote control and
monitoring of such network enabled appliances. However, the
new and exciting opportunities to increase the connectivity of
devices within the home for the purpose of home automation
through internet are yet to be explored.
Several definitions are available in the literature for home
Automation. Bromley et at (2003) describes home automation
as the "introduction of technology within the home to enhance
the quality of life of its occupants, through the provision of
different services such as telehealth, multimedia entertainment
and energy conservation". There has been significant research
into the field of home automation with many other
communication protocols like bluetooth, hand gestures, DTMF
etc. The XlO industry standard, developed in 1975 for
communication between electronic devices, is the oldest
standard identified from the author's review, providing limited
control over household devices through the home's power lines.
Sriskanthan et at (2002) introduced a Bluetooth based home
automation system, consisting of a primary controller and a
number of Bluetooth sub-controllers. AI-Ali et at (2004)

978-1-4799-2995-5/14/$31.0020 14 IEEE

The paper proposes a Raspberry Pi based home automation

system through e-mails.

277

This paper presents a basic application of Raspberry Pi in

home automation control through internet (E-mail) where
subject of the received e-mail is read by the developed algorithm
fed into raspberry Pi and system responds to the corresponding
instructions. The presented system is interactive, efficient and
flexible according to the consumer needs. It immediately replies
the status of work done by raspberry Pi to the consumer. The
proposed system has been tested practically using LEDs as
switching signal indicators, which can be seen in the presented
results. The project can be extended for more applications apart
from switching of home devices like surveillance, power
monitoring, fauIt monitoring, power control, security etc.

Fig. I. Raspberry Pi board.

II. SYSTEM CONFIGURATION

Fig. 3 describes the configuration of the proposed system.
Raspberry Pi has been chosen as the processing unit for the
system because of its user friendly features and economical
benefits. Further, python coded algorithm has been fed into the
raspberry Pi and is connected to the internet through Modulator
Demodulator (MODEM) interface to access and send e-mails to
the consumer. The Devices to be controlled have been
interfaced with raspberry Pi using relay driver circuit due to
different power ratings of devices and raspberry Pi. A display
(optional) may also be connected to view the instantaneous
status and processing of raspberry Pi.

Raspberry Pi (shown in Fig. 1) is a credit-card-sized single

board computer developed in the UK by Raspberry Pi
foundation with the intention of stimulating the teaching of
basic computer science in schools. It has two models; Model A
has 25 6Mb RAM, one USB port and no network connection.
Model B has 5 12Mb RAM, 2 USB ports and an Ethernet port. It
has a Broadcom BCM2835 system on a chip which includes an
ARMl176JZF-S 700 MHz processor, Video Core IV GPU, and
an SD card. The GPU is capable of Blu-ray quality playback,
using H.264 at 40MBits/s. It has a fast 3D core accessed using
the supplied OpenGL ES2.0 and OpenVG libraries. The chip
specifically provides HDMI and there is no VGAsupport.

The foundation provides Debian and Arch Linux ARM

distributions and also Python as the main programming
language, with the support for BBC BASIC, C and Perl, detailed
description of Raspberry Pi board has been given in Fig. 2
(Raspbefl)' Pi user guide). Python was chosen as the main
programming language, as it is generally accepted to be both
easy to learn and a fully fledged , programming language
suitable for real world applications. With the addition of
NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, IPython, and PyLab, Python can be
used for computational mathematics as well as for the analysis
of experimental data or control systems (Ali etal-2013).

Fig. 3. Layout of the proposed system configuration

Also, the recent development of the Raspberry Pi mini

computer has unlocked great potential for computing to be
applied in a vast number of areas. Due to the unique advantages
of the Raspberry Pi system, this technology holds great promise
for providing solutions within the developing world. This
includes but is not limited to education tools, especially the use
of GPIO (General Purpose Input/Output) which allows
automated data acquisition and producing simple digital control
systems in a school laboratory setting. The most distinctive
feature of the Raspberry Pi when used for educational purposes
is the GPIO module, which allows interfacing with general
purpose electronics (Ali etal-2013).

Raspberry Pi
Quick start

Receiving

III.

CONTROL ALGORITHM
3V3

LED (Switch (l
I
LED2(Switch2) rI
I
GPI04

GPIOl7

Fig. 2. Description of raspberry Pi Board.

5V

GND

I)

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

LED3(Switch3)
GPIOl8

Fig. 4. Pin layout of raspberry Pi GPIO used in system.

278

The GPIO pins for input and output have been defined to
control different devices. The Raspberry Pi board has GPIO pin
layout as shown in fig. 4. Out of the 26 pins, 3 pins have been
used to control three devices in this project which have been
represented by 3 LEDs for testing the switching signal. For
practical purposes a relay driver circuit and relays can be
interfaced with Raspberry Pi and appliances, respectively, for
their controlling.

if(len(x)<>O):
GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BOARD)
#s ignal to devices
if(x[O]

==

'ONI'):

Reply('Turning ON swithch I' , y[O])

GPIO.setup(7,GPIO.OUT)
GPIO.output(7,GPI0.HIGH)
if(x[O]

==

#Turn ON LEDI

'ON2'):

Reply('Turning ON switch 2', y[O])

GPIO.setup(II,GPIO.OUT)
GPIO.output(II,GPIO.HIGH)
if(x[O]

Initi alise the system

(i.e., log in home aCCOJIt
Rasp8err)pI, GPIOpins

==

#Turn ON LED2

'ON3'):

Reply('Turning ON swithch 3', y[O])

GPIO.setup(12,GPIO.OUT)

Dedicated to

fordevice intermcing, etc)

GPIO.output(12,GPI0.HIGH)
if(x[O]

==

#Turn ON LED3

'OFFI '):

Reply('Turning OFF swithch 1', y[O])

GPIO.setup(7,GPIO.OUT)
GPIO.output(7,GPI0.LOW)
if(x[O]

==

#Turn OFF LEDI

'OFF2'):

Reply('Turning OFF swithch 2', y[O])

GPIO.setup(II,GPIO.OUT)
GPIO.output(II,GPIO.LOW)

Implement
the funct ion

if(x[O]

correspondi

==

#Turn OFF LED2

'OFF3'):

Reply('Turning OFF swithch 3', y[O])

ng to the
read subject

GPIO.setup( 12,GPIO.OUT)

and reply

GPIO.output(12,GPI0.LOW)

the status to

the senrer

time.sleep(O.S)

#Turn OFF LED3

#call delay

Fig. 6. Control Structure of proposed algorithm coded in pythonIDE

Wait for 0. 5 s e conds befu re
checking thc new mail and

update

IV. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION

For verification of the practicality of the proposed algorithm,
LEDs were used to indicate the switching signal of the
interfaced devices. The experimental setup is shown in Fig. 7.
Results were generated by a series of E-mails sent to the G-mail
account of raspberry pi and the corresponding inbox and sent
mails of raspberry G-mail account are shown in Fig. 8 and Fig.
9, respectively. For example, an E-mail with the subject

Fig. 5. Flowchart of the control algorithm used.

The pins used in this project were: pin7(GPI04),

pinll(GPIOI7) and pinI2(GPIOI8) . The code for
implementing the control strategy for home automation was
written in python environment on Raspberry Pi. Firstly, the
code was set to initialize and log in into home g-mail account (g
mail-imap) using the e-mail library of pythonIDE. After
successful initialization, Raspberry Pi starts reading the
subjects of e-mails from the account specified in the code. The
subject of these e-mails is then compared from the initializing
commands of the interfaced devices and the control signal is
generated according to it on the corresponding GPIO pin. This
process is repeated continuously at an interval of 0.5 seconds.
Fig. 5 represents the algorithm of the used code in the form of
flowchart. Fig. 6 shows the controlling module of the proposed
algorithm, coded in pythonIDE. Here, the subject read from the
e-mail is stored in an array x[], and the 'if structure was defmed
as per the elements of that array, i.e. if subject is 'ONI', raspberry
Pi replies 'Turning On switch I' to the sender and
simultaneously the switch at pin.7 is turned ON and the
structure is looped for checking new mail after every 0.5
seconds.

Fig. 7. Working Experimental setup, responding to email with subject 'On I"
i.e. LEDI is glowing, representing the switching signal for switch I.

279

O N l ' w a s s e n t t o r a s p b e r r y P i a c c o u n t
('[email protected]' in this case) from the consumer
account (,[email protected]' in this case). The algorithm,
read the subject 'ONI' and turned ON the device 1 represented
by LEDI and instantly replied to sender by an email 'Turning ON switch l' under the subject- 'Home automation
activated'. The code also includes exception handling in case of
invalid e-mail from the consumer.

Go gle
Gmail-

*NH+*

Inbox

Home_automation_activated

GoDaddy - Find New Custo mers Online - Rs.

Starred

Similarly the same switch can be turned OFF by sending an

e-mail with subject 'OFFI' to the raspberry Pi account. Further,
This work consists of two more switches which can be
controlled by sending e-mails under the subject- 'ON2' & 'ON3'
to turn ON the switch2 & Switch3 and correspondingly - 'OFF2'
& 'OFF3" to turn them OFF. So, the results show that home
automation has been successfully implemented with efficiency
and reliability.

to anant vaib ...

Sent Mail

Turning ON swithch

Drafts

[email protected]

Circles

to anantvaib ....
-

.....

Search, chat

Turning OFF swithch

or SMS

[email protected]

Looks like you donOt

have anyone to chat

to ananLvaib ....

with yet. Invite some

Turning ON switch

contacts to get started.

Learn more

In this highly developing era, where directly or indirectly,

everything is dependent on computation and information
technology, Raspberry Pi proves to be a smart, economic and
efficient platform for implementing the home automation. This
paper provides a basic application of home automation using
Raspberry Pi which can be easily implemented and used
efficiently. The code provided is generic and flexible in a user
friendly manner and can be extended for any future applications
like power control, surveillance, etc, easily. Moreover, this
technique is better than other home automation methods is
several ways. For example, in home automation through DTMF,
the call tariff is a huge disadvantage, which is not the case in
proposed method. Also, in Web server based home automation,
the design of web server and the space required is eliminated by
this method, because it simply uses the already existing web
server provided by G-mail.

[email protected]
to ananLvaib ....
Turning ON swithch

Fig.

9. Screen shot of "SENT MAIL" from raspberry Pi

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[I]

AI-Ali A. R. and AI-Rousan M., "Java-based home automation

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gle

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Gmail

10

[email protected]

Important

V. CONCLUSION & FUTURE SCOPE

Go

....

Systems,

More ..

Primary

Connectivity

and

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[6]

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.-

Soc

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controller for home energy

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Inbox
Anant vaibhav (2)

[7]

ON1

Starred
Important
Sent Mail

Ok S. and Park H. , "Implementation of initial provisioning

function for home gateway based on open service gateway
initiative platform", T he 8th International Conference on

Anant vaibhav

OFF1

Anant vaibhav

ON2

Advanced Communication Technology,pp. 1517-1520,2006.

[8 ]

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[9 ]
Fig.

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8. Screen shot of "lNBOX" received on raspberry Pi

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[ 10 ]

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280

Communication