Add-on Smart Switch

Keywords: Course Project, Mechanical Design, TCP Communication, VPS Server and ESP8266 Client, IOT

Tutor: Prof. Lingsong He (SUSTech, Shenzhen China / HUST, Wuhan China)

Members: Shenggao Li, Yunhao Zhang

Brief: Most of the smart switch in the market are build in a general switch box which means you have to ask an electrician to exchange the old switch or do it yourself but taking risk. Besides, if you are a student who are still live in the campus, your collage may not allow student to change the circuit on their own. Last but not the least, this kind of switch usually use a capacitive button but not mechanical switch as the human interface, as a result, if the logic board or the button it self is broken, you may find extremely hard to switch on or off the light or other electrical appliance. Therefore, we built that Add-on Smart Switch demo and try to find a way which can solve these problems.

Division: We (I and Yunhao Zhang) work together.

The switch has a servo motor which is controlled by a Arduino UNO board to move the jaw and push the traditional mechanical switch to control the lights. The position of the jaw is adjustable as shown in the picture. That's modular design, no matter how many switches are there on an individual switch box, you just have to buy the correct number of the smart jaw part and only one platform. Then you can fix these all jaws on the right position.

The Arduino board is connected to an ESP8266 Wi-Fi module which is the key to connect to the Network. We built a VPS (Virtual Private Server) in one of the data center in the USA and deployed our own server application (wrote by me in Python3.6) on it. Our smart switch would auto connect to the server (through TCP) once it was power on. I also wrote a iOS application and deployed on our iPhone which would also connect to the server and send command message to the switch. Our server program and iOS app can support up to 65535 switches at on time.

As you can see, that demo still has many problems for example the stiffness of the jaw is too low to perfect push the mechanical switch. However, we still believe it a reasonable design to solve the existing problems on the smart switch in the market.

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