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Home appliances management system using Controller Area Network (CAN)

Article · October 2011

DOI: 10.1109/APCC.2011.6152937

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 2011 17th Asia-Pacific Conference on Communications (APCC)
2nd – 5th October 2011 | Sutera Harbour Resort, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia
Home Appliances Management System using
Controller Area Network (CAN)
Kent How Teh, Wei Lun Ng, Chee Kyun Ng and Nor Kamariah Noordin
Department of Computer and Communication Systems Engineering, Faculty of Engineering,
Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400 UPM Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia
{kent5244, william_2909}@hotmail.com, {mpnck, nknordin}@eng.upm.edu.my
Abstract— Smart homes can be a potential application which
provides unobtrusive support for the normal users, elderly or
disabled that wants to promote independent living. Generally,
smart home consists of various sensors, controllers and home
network that are placed around the house. This paper presents a
simple home networking system by using Controller Area
Network (CAN) as the main communication protocol to manage
multiple home appliances. The proposed management system
consists of three main components: central controller subsystem
(CCS), CAN module and relay module. CCS is a simple server
where a simple graphical user interface (GUI) is built with
multiple command buttons to obtain the user inputs. The CAN
module is distinguished as either master CAN node or slave CAN
node. The master CAN node is a CAN module that is attached to
CCS. In contrast, the CAN module that attached to the home
appliance is known as slave CAN node. The user input signal that
contains a CAN data frame broadcasts from master CAN node to
all slave CAN nodes via CAN bus. Each data frame consists of an
identifier that is compared by each slave CAN node. If the
identifier is not matched, the signal will be discarded by the slave
CAN node. Otherwise, the slave CAN node will decode the data
frame and execute the given command. The relay module of this
slave CAN node will either switch ‘ON’ or ‘OFF’ the
corresponding home appliances. The proposed management
system using CAN has the advantages of being simple in its
design which contributes to the overall low cost. Moreover, the
CAN network system is immune from the electrical interferences.
Finally, the experimental results have shown that the proposed
system is operating accurately and efficiently.
Keywords- Home appliances; CAN; identifier.
I. INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, advancement in technologies allows people to
conveniently execute complicated or tedious tasks with just a
simple click. It’s obvious that researcher incorporates these
technologies to ease the daily household chores. Various home
appliances are created to help people to complete certain tasks
in providing comfort environment and offering entertainment
[1]. Nevertheless, people still needs to manage their home
appliances in order to complete certain tasks as the current
home appliances are yet “intelligent” enough to be operated
automatically with certain condition. Moreover, the elderly and
disabled people also request a system that could help them to
manage their daily tasks such that the burden for the caregivers
would be reduced. Hence, a “smart” system needs to be
developed and deployed in house in order to improve the living
standard of people especially for elderly and people with
978-1-4577-0390-4/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE
disabilities [2]. These situations have led to the invention of
smart home system.
Smart home system is normally deployed in buildings with
the purpose of enhancing safety, comfort, communication and
power saving with less human interaction. It usually consists of
sensors and actuators. Sensor is used to collect data from the
physical environment while actuators are meant to make
decisions based on the information gathered by the sensors [3].
A network is also required for the purpose of establishing
communication between sensors and actuators [4]. As the
technologies become advances, the current smart home system
has been developed to be more flexible and adaptable to the
changing lifestyles [5].
From the rapid advancement in technology, various type of
information can be shared easily, efficiently, and effectively
through networking. There are many communication networks
such as local area network (LAN), power line communication,
ZigBee and so on are suitable to be implemented as the smart
home network. LAN generally provides high-bandwidth
communication over inexpensive transmission media such as
twisted pair, coaxial cable and fiber optic. However, a set of
software protocols which is necessary to be implemented in the
host computers to enable the LAN to transmit and receive the
control data from one host or device to another via the
transmission mediums of the network. The software protocols
are the integral part which functions at various levels, starts
from low level packet transport protocols to high-level
application protocols [6].
Traditionally, power lines are only intended for conveying
electrical power to devices and not designed for delivering
high-frequency signals. Although the advancement of signal
modulation and error control coding techniques have made
power line communication (PLC) become possible [7], it is not
suitable for signal transmission due to noise and interference in
the power line channel. Consequently, power line signal
transmission will encounter variety of characteristic
impedances. ZigBee is the first industrial standard using
wireless personal area network (WPAN) technology that
provides short range, low power and low data rate
communication, and also supports mesh networking and multi-
hopping. However, ZigBee networks are primarily intended for
low duty-cycle sensors especially for those active for less than
1% of the time [8], [9].
In this paper, a simple and reliable smart home system to
control multiple home appliances is presented. The proposed
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home appliances management system is using Controller Area
Network (CAN) as the main communication protocol to
operate the home appliances. The developed home networking
system consists of three main subsystems such as central
controller subsystem (CCS), CAN module and relay module.
In the CCS server, the generated commands to control multiple
home appliances are obtained when user click on the provided
options that are available on the developed Graphical User
Interface (GUI).
The CAN module can be either master CAN node or slave
CAN node. The generated signal from CCS will be then
transmitted to master CAN via serial communication bus. The
master CAN node encodes the received signal into CAN data (a)
frame and broadcasts it in the CAN bus. The slave CAN nodes
that are attached to various home appliances will receive the
CAN data frame via the CAN bus. An identifier is then
extracted from the data frame in each slave CAN node. This
identifier will compare with the identifier of each slave CAN
node. If the identifier is not matched, the signal will be
discarded. If it is matched, the slave CAN node will decode the
received data frame and execute the given command. The relay
module of this slave CAN node will switch ‘ON’ or ‘OFF’ the
attached home appliance when it is triggered.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section II
presents the overview of CAN. Section III presents the
proposed system overview by utilizing CAN in a smart home (b)
network. The obtained results and a brief comparison of CAN
to other network protocol are shown in Section IV. Finally, this Figure 1. Data transmission methods; (a) traditional wiring and (b) CAN.
paper is concluded in Section V.
A. CAN Protocol
II. CAN OVERVIEW The CAN system uses carrier sense multiple access with
Controller Area Network or so-called CAN is a serial bus collision detection (CSMA/CD) and arbitration on message
that utilizes broadcast method to transmit messages across all priority as its communication protocol. This communication
CAN nodes. It uses a serial control protocol which provides protocol allows every node in CAN to monitor the network bus
reliable, efficient and economic link between devices to in advance before attempting to transmit a message. When no
support the distributed real time applications by using a bit- activity occurs in the network, each node has the same
wise deterministic collision-resolution mechanism. It was opportunity to transmit a message. Additionally, this
originally developed in the 1980s by Robert Boush as an communication protocol allows collision to be solved by using
alternative data communications for interconnecting the control bit-wise arbitration. It is based on a pre-programmed priority of
components in automotive vehicles [10]. each message in the identifier field of a message. This
configuration allows the messages to remain intact after the
Prior to CAN technology, all manufacturers used to connect
arbitration is completed even if collisions are detected. In order
devices within vehicles using point to point wiring systems.
for the arbitration process to be successful, the logic states need
Wiring started to become more complex, bulky, heavy and
to be defined as dominant or recessive. An example of CAN
expensive as more electronics and controllers are deployed in a
arbitration can be seen in Figure 2 when three nodes are
vehicle. This problem can be seen in Figure 1(a), where the
assumed to be transmitting simultaneously.
abundance of wiring is required which makes the whole circuit
even more complicated. CAN system can solve this problem by
utilizing a twisted pair cable to communicate with each other as
shown in Figure 1(b) [11].
Initially, it was designed to allow the microcontrollers and
devices to communicate with each other within a vehicle
without a host computer. It has been fast gaining wide
appreciation with further applied in various automation
industrial including military, aviation, electronics, factories and
many others due to its high immunity towards electrical
interference, and the ability to self diagnose and repair the data
errors. Additionally, the low cost, performance and
upgradeability to provide tremendous flexibility in the system Figure 2. CAN arbitration.
design add to its many advantages [12].

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 When three nodes start transmitting their start of frame
(SOF) bits simultaneously, the Nodes 1 and 2 stop transmitting
as soon as they transmit bit ‘1’ (recessive level) while Node 3
is transmitting bit ‘0’ (dominant level). At this instance, Node 3
will continue its transmission when the identifier of bit ‘0’ has
been transmitted while Nodes 1 and 2 are entering into the
receiver mode which indicated in grey colour. The CAN
protocol is defined with the ISO standard of 11-bit identifier
that provides for the signalling rates from 125 kbps to 1 Mbps.
This standard is later improved to allow for larger number of
bit with the "extended" version of 29-bit identifier. The 11-bit
identifier standard provides 211 or 2048 different message
identifiers while the extended 29-bit identifier standard
provides 229 or 537 million identifiers. The data format of both
standards can be seen in Figure 3 [12].
(a)
(b)
Figure 3. Frame format of (a) standard CAN and (b) extended CAN.
B. CAN node
CAN consist of several CAN nodes that are linked to each
other through CAN bus. The composition of each CAN node is
similar which included CAN transceiver, CAN controller and
microcontroller. The CAN transceiver is fault-tolerant device
that serves as the interface between CAN controller and CAN
bus while provides differential transmit and receive capability
by using CAN protocol. The CAN controller serves as an
interface between CAN transceiver and microcontroller. It is
responsible for the CAN frame conversion. Microcontroller is
the front end device which interacts with the system controller.
Only one CAN node so-called master CAN node will transmit
its data to the CAN bus at a time, while others which known as
slave CAN nodes will become receiver nodes. Thus, the CAN
protocol is governing the flow of the signal in the CAN bus to
avoid bus conflict. Figure 4 shows the overview of a CAN
node which is attached to the CAN bus [13].
Figure 4. Overview of CAN node.
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C. CAN bus
CAN bus is the transmission medium between CAN nodes.
It is made out of a simple pair of copper wire which can be
terminated by a simple 120 Ω resistor. The purpose of the
termination is to minimize or prevent the signal reflection at
the end of the bus that would cause interference to the system.
Hence, the CAN bus can be perfectly implemented in
environment which produce serious noise. Prioritized messages
of up to eight bytes in data length can be sent on a multi-master
serial bus by using an arbitration protocol and an error-
detection mechanism for a high level of data integrity. The
transmission rate is depended on the bus length. For a bus
smaller than 40 meters the transmission rate is up to 1 Mbps
[14].
According to the ISO-11898 standard, the CAN bus must
be terminated with a characteristic impedance of 120 ohms.
There are three methods to terminate the CAN bus such as
standard termination, split termination and biased split
termination. The standard termination method is the most
common termination method which places a 120 Ω resistor at
each end of the CAN bus as shown in Figure 5(a). The split
termination method is gaining its popularity since it allows
reducing emission. In this termination method, at the end of the
CAN bus is split with 60 Ω resistor as shown in Figure 5(b).
The biased split termination method is similar to split
termination method except that a voltage divider circuit and a
capacitor are used at either end of the CAN bus as shown in
Figure 5(c). This method increases the electromagnetic
compatibility (EMC) performance of the CAN bus [14].
(a)
(b) (c)
Figure 5. Can bus termination methods; (a) standard, (b) split, and (c) biased
split.
III. SYSTEM DESIGN OVERVIEW
The popularity of CAN system has been increased due to
the flexibility of its implementation in various automation
applications. The home appliances automation system in smart
home is one of its applications. The CAN system can be
incorporated to become a backbone for all home appliances in
a home networking environment. This system is intended to
offer a smooth data transmission which allows the home users
to monitor and control the home appliances. In this section, we
present the system designs in the implementation of home
appliances automation system using CAN home networking.
The overall of the proposed system is divided into three
subsystems; central controller server, CAN module and relay
module as shown in Figure 6. The proposed system is
developed with an assumption that the current home appliances
are mostly controlled by turning it ON and OFF.
As shown in Figure 6, the personal computer (PC) acts as
the CCS where a simple developed GUI has been stored into it.
There are many options available in GUI to be selected which
will produce different commands to control the home
appliances. Initially, the CCS will send the command signals to
the CAN module which known as master CAN node through a
serial bus. The received command signal will then trigger the
microcontroller in the master CAN node to transmit a packet of
signal which consists of a few important parameters (e.g.
Identifier, data, etc) to the whole home network via CAN bus.
All the home appliance CAN nodes or slave CAN nodes
which are connected to the CAN bus will receive the CAN data
frame. The data frame will be decoded by each CAN node to
extract the important data which included identifier for
matching process. When the identifier of the data frame signal
matches with the identifier that is allocated for the particular
CAN node, the microcontroller of this CAN node will trigger
events according to the received command data. In this case,
the relay module of this CAN node will turn to ‘ON’ or ‘OFF’
accordingly.
Figure 6. An overview of the developed smart home system.
A. Central Controller Server (CCS)
CCS consists of a standalone PC with a stored smart home
GUI system to communicate with the master CAN node via RS
232 serial bus. The main function of CCS is to provide
simplicity and convenient for the user to perform certain action
according to the given input. In order for the master CAN node
to receive the command signal from CCS, MAX 232 is
necessary. The MAX 232 IC contains dual driver/receiver in a
same package to adapt the RS 232 signal voltage levels to the
TTL logic. In other words, it converts the command signal in
RS 232 to a signal that recognized by the microcontroller.
Thus, converting voltage signal is the prime function of
MAX232. Since it acts just a driver/receiver, the necessary RS
902
232 sequence of marks and spaces is not generated in the right
timing.
B. CAN module
The CAN module functions as the controller of the smart
home system. This module is divided into two categories
namely master CAN node and slave CAN node. Both master
and slave CAN nodes consist of CAN transceiver (MCP 2551),
CAN controller (MCP 2515) and microcontroller (PIC
16F877A). The overall CAN module layouts with the master
and slave CAN nodes that linked together by a CAN bus are
shown in Figure 7.
MCP 2551 is a CAN device that serves as the interface
between a CAN controller and the CAN bus. The function of
the MCP 2551 is essentially to convert the generated digital
signals by a CAN controller to signals that are suitable for the
transmission over CAN bus. On the other hand, MCP 2515 has
different functionality between master and slave CAN nodes.
In the master CAN node, it helps to encode the signal from PIC
16F877A microcontroller to CAN data frame as shown in
Figure 8(a). In the slave CAN node, the MCP 2515 decodes the
CAN data frame received from the MCP 2551 to the signal that
microcontroller can understand. The transition process is
illustrated in Figure 8(b).
(a)
(b)
Figure 7. CAN module circuit diagram; (a) master CAN node and (b) slave
CAN node.
 IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
There are several experiments have been carried out to
verify the system’s accuracy and efficiency. The accuracy test
is carried out in order to determine the deviation of received
signal from the original signal. As for the efficiency test, it is
conducted to determine the time taken for the CAN data frame
to propagate from one end of the CAN bus to another end.
The accuracy and efficiency tests are carried out by using a
(a)
digital oscilloscope to measure the transmission time of CAN
data frame at the master CAN node to the slave CAN node
with different CAN bus lengths during a signal transmission.
The assessment has used five CAN bus with different lengths
of 4m, 8m and 20m as shown in Figure 10.
From the results, the signals on channel 1 and channel 2 for
each CAN data frame transmission are identical. This indicates
that the time delay is insignificant for CAN data frame
transmission over the CAN bus with length ranging from 4m to
20m. Hence, the efficiency for CAN data frame transmission
(b) can be concluded as very high.
Figure 8. CAN data frame codec processes; (a) encoding and (b) decoding.

C. Relay module
The relay module is used as a switching mechanism that turns
‘ON’ or turns ‘OFF’ the home appliances that connected to it.
The input signal of the relay module is come from
microcontroller of the slave CAN node which normally ranged
from 4.5V to 5V. A relay is an electromagnetic switch that is
actuated by an electrical current. Inside a relay there are two
types of circuit: coil circuit and normal circuit as shown in
Figure 9. When a current flows through the coil circuit, an
electromagnetic force will be produced. This force will then
pull the metal piece down in order to close the normal circuit.
This situation will make current to flow from the normal circuit
and thus turning ON an electrical device.

(a)

Figure 9. The working principle of relay module. (b)

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 V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, the home appliances management system
using CAN as the main communication protocol to control
multiple home appliances has been presented. Based on the
experimental results, the proposed system has the capability of
controlling home aplliances acurately and effectively with
minimal time delay. Moreover, the proposed system has the
advantages of being simple in its design which contributed to
the overall low cost. Also, by using CAN, the network system
is free from electrical interferences as it is immune to it.

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Coverage device is device is
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to PLC to PLC
to CAN bus to router
adapter adapter

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