The Internet Power Line Adapter - University of Queensland

Home Automation, Power Lines and the Internet Quenten Alick
an entire thesis topic in itself, according to one of the department’s lecturers. It
is also an area much more suited to design by a power or electrical engineering
student, rather than a computer systems engineering student. Even when the
topic was reduced to a simple meter that was not accurate, the full implications
of designing an interface to the mains supply did not sink in. Resistors only
come with power ratings up to a certain value and so what may have been
feasible for low voltages rapidly become non-feasible for larger voltages.
The end result of this is that more time should and could have been spent
working on the main focus of this thesis, which is the power line
communications. If the topic had been defined earlier and more clearly, then this
thesis would have been completed in a much more efficient manner.
7.2 Future Direction
The future direction that this thesis could take is self-evident. Moving back to
the original plan would realize a product much more suitable for use in a modern
home automation system. With an embedded web server the entire server end of
the system could control and monitor many adapters around the home, all of
which would gather information about the power consumption within a home.
Then either the server itself or an external user could make decisions about
which appliances to run depending upon their power consumption.
This step would involve changing the microprocessor at least in the server. A
suitable processor for the web server would probably be 32 bit with 4Mb of
external RAM. This should be sufficient to run ELKS or a similar operating
system. Then all that is needed is dedicated web server code to handle the HTTP
requests and some code to control the client via the power line communications
network chip. The options to connect the web server are either an Ethernet link
or a modem. Considering that most homes these days do not have an Ethernet
Internet connection, the use of a modem is probably the better choice.
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