Research Method: Smart City Concept

Chapter 3: Research Method
Research Methodology and Design
Materials or Instrumentation
The main materials or instrumentation will include a monitoring system, which will be used to create the smart city concept. The system will include a cloud (firebase), where the information obtained will be stored. There will also be a base station, which will include a WSN gateway, an application, such as a smart watch, and a coordinator node, which will provide the wireless connection of the different sensors around the house. Then there will be sensor nodes, which will be connected to the specific areas of power consumption and water usage around the house to monitor the usage of these resources. There will also be questionnaires, which will help in collecting important demographic data from the clients. The researchers will also have a recording sheet to note down the electricity and water consumption rate for each household.
All the electrical appliances will be controlled by the ZigBee wireless communication technology. The technology will establish a wireless link between the end divices connected to the electrical applicances placed all round the house and the control unit. A digital signal generated from the XBee coordinator will be relayed to all XBee end devices. The user will then be able to control the electrical appliances from a centralized controller through a computer system’s GUI by simply switching the ON or OF button. The user will be able to monitor electricity and water usage as well as the amount of garbage collected via a computer that has XBee coordinator connected. The user will be able to control power consumption used in the household for a specified peood by controlling the operation of the various appliances. The components that the user will utilize in controlling these electrical components will include an optical photo coupler switch, S2S3, and a BT138-800E triac. The choice for these components emanated from an analysis of the different types of control applications, such as relay circuits. The triac BT138 will help in the switching ON or OFF of the electrical appliances. This device is a Planar Passivated sensitive gate four quandrant triac and quite reliable for application in general purpose bidirectional switching and phasor control applications. All the sensor nodes will be deployed in the environment based on the intended use. Each node will then be designed to receive a Beacon signal and to respond with its id and its location coordinates.
The ultimate goal of this connections is to calculate the number of electricity units consumes and expresss it in terms of either current, voltage, or time. measuring the alternative current source is a complex process as there are only a few devices available to conduct the exercise. A viable option is the use of a current transformer (CT) sensors, which can be clipped on to a phase wire and used to measure the current proportionally to be calibrated through software. The current transformer will be installed by clopping either the live or neural wires that entere the electric meter with the CT. the setup will also include an Arduino board, a micro-controller that can be programmed with the help of an Arduino IDE software and comprises ofa microcontroller...