DATA TRANSFER AND CONTROL OF HOME

1 2 3 4
M, Tamil Alagan, K.Jayaprakash, D. Sreenivasan, and K. Somaya Vimalraju
APPLIANCES USING POWER LINE
COMMUNICATION
1,3,4
Asst.Prof./ EEE, E.G.S.Pillay Engg. College, Nagapattinam
2
P.G. Scholar./ EEE, Bharathiyar College of Engg. & Tech., Karaikal.

Abstract - Nowadays, there are many technologies that have
been developed for control applications. Power line
communication (PLC) is one of the technologies that have
proved useful for control applications. It is widely use in home
automation, automotive and internet access applications. The
aim of the project is to design a Power Line Communication
Modem Circuit to control the home appliances between a Host
PC and a Slave Application Device. This report will discuss on
the required technology and knowledge involved in the power
line modem design. Hence, information on how the concept of
modulation schemes are introduced, how signal will transmit
through the power line and eventually work plan for the
practical design of power line modem will be discussed in this
paper. Also, academic research and study on the performance
of the transmission system was elaborated in detail, such as,
by using the Multisim software to validate the design and
component used in the circuitry prior to the building of actual
circuitry. Lastly, a lab view software will be used to
demonstrate the two power line modem interact with each
other on this communication system, by controlling a lamp
from a PC.
I.INTRODUCTION
A Power Line Communication System is a system whereby
communication signals were sent and received on household
and industrial 50Hz current-bearing power line.
Power Line Carrier Communication has recently become a
popular technology for home automation and networking. It is
because power line is a relatively cheaper and more robust
communication channel used throughout the world except
wireless channel. It is used more commonly used than any
other communication channel.
A simple digital communication system usually consists of an
encoder and a modulator on the transmitting side, and a
decoder and a demodulator on the receiving side. However, to
support two ways communication (full duplex or half duplex),
modem (modulator/demodulator) devices are designed and
used in communication systems nowadays.
A power line modem is an all-in-one device which consists of
an encoder, a decoder, a modulator, and a demodulator. As the
current bearing AC mains power line is used as a transmission
medium, additional coupling circuits are required in power
line modems for better protection, isolation and impedance
matching.
Power line modems can be used in various applications;
however, the study on the use of Power Line Modems for this
report will mainly be focused on home automation
applications.
The figure 1 below illustrates a typical conceptual view on the
use of power line modem for home automation network.
Figure 1 Block Diagram
A general purpose PC serves as the PLC (Power Line
Communication) enabled main control centre or a master
Node for home automation network. PLC enabled Lamp, air
conditioner, television, and other electrical devices are slave
nodes in the network. From the point of view of a home user, a
PLC enabled TV will look exactly the same as a normal TV as
the communication and control unit is embedded within and
no additional wire is required for communication.
The AC power line acts as the communication medium for all
the electrical devices and master control centre a data
acquisition, monitoring, and control software will run on the
PC.
Switching on/off the electrical lamps, checking room
temperature and controlling the air conditioner and other
various automatic applications can be configured through
proper use of developed software running on PC.
Each node of PLC enabled electrical device will have its own
network address. The Power Line Modem enables the address,
command, and data message frames to be sent over the AC
Power Line.
Due to cost constraints, such kind of PLC enabled products
could seldom be found in the consumer market at this moment
in time, however, it is likely to see such kind of systems in the
near future.
A. SYSTEM DESIGN
System design consists of hardware and software design. In
hardware design, design and building of associated circuitry,
like coupling circuit, modem IC circuit, level converter and
power supply. These works comprises of derivation of
mathematical model and simulation work. Whereas, the
software design, is to design and develop a Labview
application for interfacing between power line modem and PC.
II. POWER LINE MODEM
The figure below shows is a general description of a power
line modem hardware design.
Figure 2
Along the transmission path, the source digital data input or
output from the Transmit/Receive Buffer of an Embedded
Control Unit or a Host PC Communication Port is first
modulated onto a kHz frequency carrier, and then it is again
conditioned (filtered or amplified) and coupled upon 50Hz
230V AC mains line. The reception part of the modem
demodulates the received digital data back from the modulated
carrier.
A.Power Line Modem ICs
The figure below shows a typical IC Solution for power line
modem
The use of power line modem ICs simplifies the power line
modem circuitry. The modulator, demodulator circuits and
interfaces to the Host are now all embedded in single IC chip
set. The host controller or PC may write data bytes to the
communication port of the modem IC chip set with the use of
level converter.
With the use of power line modem IC, only level converter
ICs such as MAX232, a power supply circuit, analog front
end, coupling circuit and sometimes external oscillator circuits
are required to design in a power line modem device. Some
intelligent modem ICs even have inherent error correction,
coding/decoding and the MAC Layer and Physical Layer
Management built in a single chip.
The IC solutions available in the market can be one of the two
categories:
  Broad band chipsets, operating at 1.6Mhz up to 80
MHz frequency
  Narrow band ICs, operation at frequencies less
than 1 MHz
TDA5051A is selected for this power line modem design
project as it is a low cost but efficient IC with convenient
UART interfaces. The others advantage is the availability of
technical datasheet and lead time for purchasing the parts
which can source locally easily.
B. Detail Design of Power Line Modem
The design of power line modem is divided into 3 main sub
units, which inclusive of digital unit, power supply and
coupling circuit. This is to ease off verification and
troubleshooting during the design process.
These main sub units are as follow:-
1. Digital Unit which consists of:
a. TDA5051A Modem IC Circuit
b. Interface Circuit
2. Power Supply
3. Coupling Circuit
The figure 3 below shows the signal and power connections
between three sub-units:
Fig.4 Signal & Power Connections for Power Line Modem
C. TDA5051A Modem IC Functional Description and
Important Design Parameters
TDA5051A is a modem Integration circuit chipset, operates
from a 5VDC supply. This dedicated to transmit data over a
power line network by means of any two wire networks in
exchanging information. The modulation scheme is used
Amplitude Shift Keying (ASK) carrier technique with a data
baud rate of 600 or maximum of 1200. In this amplitude
modulation technique, the modulation signals for binary 1 is
equal to the amplitude of the carrier frequency and is “0” for
binary 0 as shown in figure 10. Amplitude shift keying (ASK) III. IMPLEMENTATION
is also called as on & off keying because of this unique
property. Max 232 Level converter
TDA5051A modem IC chipset will be used for direct interface
with RS232/TTL level converter from the modem to computer
serial port. The Max232 from Maxim is used as the heart of
RS232/TTL level converter. This Max232 IC provides the best
noise reduction and also very reliable again discharge and
short circuit. Also, its low power consumption logic can
operate in the range of 0V and +3.3V or even lower voltage.
The purpose of using this level converter in this design is to
covert TTL logic which operate between 0V to 5V into RS232
which having the operating voltage from -15V to
+15V.Whereby the voltage level operate for Data IN & Data
OUT from the modem IC chipset is about 2.5VDC. By doing
FIG: Amplitude Shift Keying that, modem IC chipset will not be damage with these high
level voltage.
With the help of few components connect externally which
used for decouple purposes. Also as a form of protection on
the chipset against overvoltage surge and negative transient
signals. A standard quartz crystal will used to connect on-chip
reference oscillator which required set the operating frequency
known as carrier frequency in transmission mode and
receiving mode which known as detection frequency. The chip
is based on the automatically tuned filters for transmit and
receive.

All inputs and outputs signal are compatible with TTL/CMOS

feature, which provide easy connection to the interface
hardware inputs & outputs port.

Figure : interface circuit design

Power Supply
Instead of using a 9V battery pack going into the voltage
regulator to obtain the 5VDC source to power the modem. AC
power supply will be designed to power the modem circuitry.
The reason is being, when using a 9V battery pack once the
voltage drop below 6.5VDC, the supply voltage after the
voltage regulator drop to below 4.5V. The modem chipset will
not be able to operate when the supply voltage is less than
4.75VDC according to the datasheet [2]. This problem will
encounter during the testing of modem chipset. Also, another
disadvantage of using the battery source is there won’t be any
indication/notification to the user when voltage fall below the
threshold value, the user will only aware or notify when the
Fig: TDA5051A chipset modem stop operation (transmit/receive). Despite it will
provide a pure DC source for the modem. On the other hand,
In this TDA5051A chipset, it can divide them into 3 major the advantage of using battery pack is, when using the modem
sections which make up a complete modem IC. All these 3 it need not to turn on the power source to power up the
major sections will be discussed in the next following topic on modem, thus it help to save some energy.
their functionality and operation. However, after considering all this pro & con, having
1. Transmission Section a reliable source is still an essential for this device to prevent
this constraints. After all, the consumption for this entire
2. Reception Section
device will not exceed 76mA, thus the energy usage is very
3. Clock Section low. AC power supply would be the most ideal choice instead
of battery source.
This AC power supply circuit will be fed in with 230VAC and
eventually step down and covert to 5VDC with the help of
voltage regulator and few components act as half wave
rectifier. In this power supply, it consists of primary and
secondary protection. Secondary protection consists of the
metal oxide varistors (MOV), rated at 230VAC for the power
line operation. This MOV will be able to limit the overvoltage
spikes which might damage Capacitor (C1). Whereas a
primary protection includes an extra fast fuse connected
before the MOV, this is to overcome the long and severe
overvoltage, so that the fuse will be destroyed before the
MOV.
Capacitor (C1) is used to discharge high voltage, whereas to
R1 & L1 is connected before the rectifier to prevent current
surge during power up. And with D2 and C2 in place, it
provides a minimum voltage 28VDC before entering into the
voltage regulator. Which will eventually generate a +5VDC
source after go through a voltage regulator.
Figure : power supply
Figure power supply equivalent circuit
Coupling Circuit Specification
As modem IC chipset usually has maximum voltage ratings of
less than 50V, the operating voltage of AC mains can easily
damage the IC chipset. The coupling circuit has to effectively
block this AC mains signal preventing it from reaching the
input of modem communication system [21]. Another main
purpose is to block low frequency power signal which allow
high frequency (carrier frequency) to pass into the modem IC
chipset.
A typical 230V AC mains power line can be seen as a 50Hz
sine wave signal source, delivering 167 dBμ Vrms to the
modem communication system at about 30 ohms line
impedance of load.
Since the modem sensitivity of TDA5051A is about 82dBuV
as specify from the datasheet [2], it is mandatory to provide an
attenuation of 167-82=85dB of the 50Hz sine wave
component.
However, the coupling network is not only a high-pass filter,
the digital filter of the RX section in TDA5051A needs an
anti- aliasing filter in order to function properly.
In transmission mode of TDA5051A, the band-pass filter is
used to eliminate the unexpected harmonics digitized carrier
and the aliasing components around the sampling frequency
(Fosc/2+Fc, Fosc/2-Fc) as shown in figure22. In general, the
main features of coupling network, is to 50 Hz rejection >
80dB with anti aliasing for the digital filter >50dB at the
sampling frequency of (1/2fOSC) as shown in figure.
Fig: Coupling network curve
Coupling Circuit Design
In this coupling circuit a double LC bandpass filter is
used to provide efficient rejection 50Hz signal (high
pass) and anti-aliasing (low pass) for digital filter without
any adjustment or tunable from the components. All
values on this coupling circuit will be determine by
impedance matching from the calculation as discussed
on the circuit analysis. A unidirectional transient
suppressor (SA5.0A, D1) is connected across the
TXOUT and RXIN to protect from overvoltage. It also
protects the TXOUT from negative transient voltage
which also might damage the circuit output amplifier.
 IV. IMPLEMENTATION
B. IMPLEMENTING THE POWER LINE MODEM CONTROL
MESSAGE FRAME ON RS232 COM PORT
The figure below shows the standard bit pattern sending
character “A” (hexadecimal ‘41’ or binary 0100 0001) at serial
COM port:
Interface message frame
The interface message frame which is supposed to be sent out
via serial COM port will have a 16 bits preamble, an 8 bits
address field, 8 bits data field and 1 stop bit fields.
Considering 1 start bit and 1 stop bit of COM port
communication, it will take approximately 113 us (1/300 *
[16+8+8+1+1] ~ 113 us) to send this message frame at the
baud rate of 300 bits per second.
Preamble
It is planned to use a 16 bit preamble of 8 falling and 8 rising
edges. Implementing this on standard COM Port, the interface
software has to send character “UU” via PC COM port as a
preamble.
V.TEST RESULT AND VERIFICATION
Testing for the power line communication modem is divided
into 4 mains hardware and each hardware is tested
individually before interface and combining them together.
These 4 hardware includes, power supply, modem IC circuit,
coupling circuit and level converter. And because this test
involves with 230VAC, before commencement of the test,
safety device and safety awareness need to be considered and
put in place.
Safety device includes, MCB, Variable Transformer (Varic),
Fuse and isolating transformer will be used during the test
when the present of 230VAC.
Purpose of having those protection devices are as follows:-
 Main Circuit Breaker (MCB) – To protect from Live to
Neutral shorted
 Variable Transformer (Varic) – Vary the voltage, from 0 V
to the respective nominal value (230VAC). This is to prevent
further damage to the component if any components not
function or operating to its respective optimum performance.
 Fuse – To protect the circuit from overload
 Isolating Transformer – Although isolating transformer can
eliminates the noise and blocking of DC signals. However, in
this setup is just to eliminates bonding and it contains the
shock hazard within the device where it might be at a
hazardous potential different between the tested devices.
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