Introduction

Automation has always been a very important thing in a wide array of industries. Automation reduces labor cost, increases efficiency and increases overall revenue for certain companies. Depending on the type and cost of operation, automation systems will vary in performance and reliability.

Several automation systems are also implemented for security, safety, efficient energy usage and home use. Some of these may include closing doors during midnight, and opening them during the day, and some may even include opening valves in water stations at predetermined time, or turning on home lights at exactly 6PM in the evening and turning them off during the morning to save energy.

There are so many more applications for automation today and even though they vary, some of the most common of them involve some sort of scheduling. They are able to tell time and know when to turn on and off other devices, and thus come the inspiration for this project. In this project, a simple implementation of an automation system based on a predetermined schedule is designed and developed using the most common technologies such that not only will it be feasible for industrial application but also for home and personal use.

Much research has been done in order to determine the available technologies that can be used in order to efficiently design the device. However, a large portion of them are designed for highly industrialized purposes and the costs are certainly very prohibitive for regular home or personal use. That is why this project is undertaken to create a very feasible device and complementary software for automation.

The device will have a microcontroller, a real time clock and an electrically erasable and programmable read only memory. In order to increase the ease of use and simplicity of design the device will be powered using a regular USB socket for ease of use.USB Sockets are very widespread nowadays, almost every home that will have a computer will always have USB sockets.

Schedule entries will then be designed by the user using the associated software application which will also be developed. The desktop client software will also be responsible for writing these schedule information to the device memory in order for the devices to function without the aid of the computer once all data is stored in its own memory.

After the schedule entries are input to the device, it will then continually check for schedule entries and compare them with data from the real time clock and once a certain entry is scheduled to run for the time, it will then turn off or on a certain device as specified. This will be done in one minute resolutions allowing the device to have schedules that are accurate to one minute.

Despite the fact device schedulers already exist, this research is undertaken using new methodologies for defining schedules. The unique use of the Cron syntax which is the defacto standard for scheduling in Linux is perhaps the most unique characteristic of this study. This allows us to put complex Cron statements that will allow complex schedule entries to be added with the minimal amount of coding required. Part of this project is modifying and improving the Cron syntax for hardware implementation.

In general this project is all about implementing the famous Cron Scheduling system for software applications in to hardware applications. And because this project is applied for hardware the system is named ‘Chron’ with an embedded letter ‘h’ between ‘C’ and ‘r’ indicating it is for hardware applications. The researchers believe that this has never been done before and it carries a large potential for automation systems of varying use cases.