Smart Power Management and Home Automation

Currently, it is not possible to live without electricity. Our lifestyles influence this resource consumption. Indeed, each of us with his attitude and mores imposes a certain profile on electrical consumption. This project aims to develop a solution that allows smart remote electricity control and consumption measurements. We plan to open the way to EDGE Artificial intelligence to properly analyze the consumption profile targeting the class of electrical machines identification, failure detections, and home automation control planning for the residents' comfort.

Each electrical device connected to the electrical grid imposes its consumption line. We intend to build real-time and smart telemetry devices dedicated to electrical energy consumption. The proposed solution uses the NRF7002DK board for remote management of different sensor nodes connected on a mesh network based on NRF24L01.

The NRF7002DK acts as a central module and the heart of the system. This one is responsible for data acquisition and intelligence. It also serves as a Matter gateway to applications hosted elsewhere (cloud, smartphones,...). The NRF7002DK is placed downstream of the electrical panelboard for real-time current measurements and decision-making.

1- Working with the nRF7002DK development board

Thanks to Nordicsemi for the awarded nRF7002-DK kit. To get our hands working with it we have started by taking two major courses :

1- https://academy.nordicsemi.com/courses/nrf-connect-sdk-fundamentals/

2- https://academy.nordicsemi.com/courses/wi-fi-fundamentals/

We want to take advantage of our preceding ( https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10121892 ) work on smart home using Arduino IDE and nRF24L01. The first challenge was to program the nRF5340 included in the development board to communicate with nRF24L01 nodes. We have completed the design can be found here as nRF connect 2.51 VSCode project. And then moved toward the Matter framework starting with a blank Matter template.

1-1- Private Enhanced ShockBurst (ESB)

nRF5340 has two cores, an application core, and a network core, each with its firmware. Our design targets both cores the net core to connect withnRF24L01+ nodes, and the application core to connect with the Matter application.

We have to write two firmware one for netcore and the other for the app core.

We have used the matter template as a starting point for our design. First, we have added the following lines to the CMakeList.txt file :

1-2- Private network Enhanced ShockBurst (ESB)

The ESB connects several modules: Sensor for Light, Air quality, Current measurement, electrical switches... All are grouped on a mesh network as a single Matter entity

Data are exchanged between nodes as payload :

struct data{
  char c; // Data type
  char data[];   
}

Where c characterizes the nature of the value, for example, T for temperature, H for humidity, and C for current.

The nRF7002DK acts here as the master node for the network. The Core net Application exchanges data with the Application core via Inter Processor communication (IPC).