Over recent years industries have faced the problem of how to connect devices to ‘speak’ to each other with minimum wiring. Philips Semiconductors faced this problem when they needed to connect many ICs together. The Automotive Industry faced the same problem when it needed to connect tens of microcontrollers in each car. Recently, with smart homes, the problem has started to be part of each home. For instance, you may want to build your smart home with accessories from different manufacturers and you want the devices to ‘speak’ to each other. Added to that, you may want to control them from a central App or voice assist.
Solutions for this problem started with the introduction of Inter Integrated Circuits (IIC) and Controller Area Networks (CAN). Both solutions are wired networks that allow ICs and microcontrollers to be connected in a network to communicate together.
In smart home automation, a number of common smart home automation protocols that allow different devices to speak and communicate together have appeared during the last few decades. Some of the smart home protocols come under the umbrella of what is called the “Internet of Things (IoT)”. The proposed protocols can be grouped into wired networks e.g. X10, UPB; wireless or radio networks as ZigBee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth; or dual (wired and radio) such as Insteon.
This book introduces to the reader some of the most popular Microcontroller and Smart home networks. The book covers in detail the following protocols:• I2C• I3C• CAN• ZigBee• ZigBee Pro• Z-Wave• Bluetooth
Wi-Fi, WiMax and Insteon are part of our companion book “Serial Communication Protocols and Standards”.
This book gives detailed comparisons between the various protocols. To complete the knowledge of the reader, the book gives in the last chapter a short summary on the protocols that we did not fully cover in this volume: Ethernet, Thread, Insteon, X10 and UPB.
Prof. Dawoud Shenouda Dawoud has a BSc (1965) and MSc (1969) from Cairo University in Communication Engineering. He completed his PhD in Russia in 1973 in the field of Computer hardware where he succeeded to own 3 Patents in the field of designing new types of memory which was the beginning of the FPGAs. In 1984, he was promoted to full Professor at the Egyptian Academy of Science and Technology, National Electronic Research Institute. During the period from 1973 to 1990, he supervised more than 5 PhDs and 15 MSc degrees all of them focused in the fields of computer and embedded system designs. During the period from 1990-1999 he established the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Botswana. During this period he supervised 3 PhDs and 7 MSc degrees. In the year 2000 he became Professor of Computer Engineering and Head of the Computer Engineering Department at the University of KwaZulu Natal, Durban, South Africa. For 10 years he was supervising research in the field of Security of Mobile Ad hoc Networks. He supervised 2 PhDs and many MSc degrees in this field and published more than 30 papers. At the same period, he was visiting the National University of Rwanda to run an MSc program in Communication. He supervised about 15 MSc students during these 4 years before moving to the National University of Rwanda in 2010 to become the Dean of the Faculty of Engineering. In 2011 he moved to Uganda where he became the Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at the International University of East Africa (IUEA), where he currently remains. During this time, he also served as the Vice Chancellor of IUEA, for a period of 3 years. Across his career, he has published over 200 Journal and Conference papers, as well as books in the fields of computer engineering, microcon- troller system design, embedded system design and Security of Mobil Ad hoc Networks.
Peter Dawoud has been working in the area of biometrics and computer vision for the last six years, leading research and products within Microsoft in the space. After completing his Bachelor's degree in computer engineering, Peter spent time researching applied cryptographic and steganographic sys- tems for his Master's Degrees. Upon completion of these degrees, Peter has been focused on the productization of biometric systems for consumer and enterprise scenarios and later focused on the principles and use of centralized cloud biometrics systems in the enterprise and commercial scenarios.
