Central Hub Control of Home Appliance with Network PCBA Controller
Home appliance manufacturers can turn their legacy products into completely new generation of products by using our OEM/ODM services of network PCBA controllers. These new products will have network control capability upgrade and can bring unprecedented convenience and ease to the end users. The hardware upgrade is usually a fairly straightforward integration of a network module into the traditional home appliance PCBA controllers. It is the software upgrade and new ways to control home appliance that revitalize the legacy products.
Our dedicated teams have extensive experience and expertise in developing application software. Although the user interfaces can have many different varieties, the ways to control home appliance with network PCBA controller can be defined as either Smartphone Direct Control or Central Hub Control. The most striking difference between these two ways of controls is as follows:
Smartphone Direct Control: Manual control for individual appliance only, and
Central Hub Control: Automatic control for one or more appliances. It usually involves other smart devices such as smart sensors.
This document explains Central Hub Control only. Please also see another document titled Smartphone Direct Control of Home Appliance with Network PCBA Controller.
Central Control HUB is the most critical building block in a home automation system. Although a home automation system may consist of many other electronic control units such as switches and sensors installed around the house, or network PCBA controllers embedded in home appliances, it is the central control hub that serves as the “brain” of a home automation system in a star configuration.
System Configuration. There are a few standard network configurations, such as line, ring, mesh, tree, and bus. Among them, start network configuration proves to be the most suitable one for home automation system. Fig. 1 shows a star network configuration. It consists of a central node, to which all other nodes are connected. This central node provides a common connection point for all nodes through a hub.
Fig. 1. Star Network Layout
When being used for home automation system, star network configuration has a few inherent advantages:
a. Better performance: Information can be most efficiently exchanged between the central hub and each of the nodes without the need to involve additional nodes.
b. Easy operation: Each device is inherently isolated by the link that connects it to the hub. This isolation makes it easy to add a device, to detect a faulty device or to remove a device. This isolation also prevents any non-centralized failure from affecting the whole system.
c. Possibility of lower cost: Only the central hub requires relatively powerful components or modules such as MCU, etc. All other nodes’ devices have relatively less demanding tasks.
The central control hub in a home automation system plays a very important role. It collects information about a home environment or a building environment, such as temperature, humidity, occupancy, etc., it monitors the status of home appliances, it processes the collected information, and it sends control commands to home appliance such as air conditioner, humidifier, etc.
Fig. 2 A Typical Home Automation System in a Local Star Network Configuration
Basic System. Fig 2 shows a typical home automation system which can automatically control the temperature and humidity in a house. With a central hub at the central node in a star network configuration, the system also consists of an occupancy sensor, a temperature and humidity sensor, a heater, a humidifier, and an air conditioner. The heater, the humidifier and the air conditioner have embedded network PCBA controller. Based on a programmed algorithm, the central hub reads information from the sensors, processes the information, and sends control commands to the appliances. Of course, a more complicated home automation system may include more sensor or appliances, or more sophisticated control algorithm.
