Chapter 12. Recognizing Humans with Jarvis

By now  we have understood in the last chapter how multiple layers of conditions can be clubbed together to get the functionality that is desired. We have just completed the first step in making Jarvis work for you. Now, it's time to make it even more capable.

In this chapter, we will make it control more electronics at your home, which can be controlled autonomously without you telling anything to the system. So without delay, let's get straight into it and see what we have in our bucket.

Turn on the light Jarvis

One of the basic functionalities of a smart home is to turn on the lights for you whenever you are around. It is one of the most basic things that any system can do for you. We will start off by turning on the light as soon as you come inside the room, thereafter, we will make the system more and more intelligent.

So, the first thing we need to do is recognize whether you are in a room or not. There are multiple ways to do that. One important characteristic of life is the presence of movement. You may say plants don't move, well they do; they grow, don't they? So detecting movement can be a key step in detecting whether someone is there or not!

This step will not be so difficult for you, as we have already interfaced this sensor previously. We are talking about the good old PIR sensor. So the sensor will sense any movement in the area. If there is any movement, then Jarvis will switch on the lights. I am sure this is something you can do by yourself by now. You can...

Understanding motion

By now you must have figured that the PIR sensor is not the most idealistic sensor for us to switch the lights on or off. Mostly because, although the motion is one of the best indicators of presence, there can be times when you might not move at all, for example, while resting, reading a book, watching a movie, and so on.

What do we do now? Well, we can do a little trick. Remember in the last chapter we used our proximity sensor to sense whether a person has crossed a specific area or not? We will implant a similar logic here; but rather than just copy pasting the code, we will improve it and make it even better.

So rather than using one single IR proximity sensor, we will be using two of these things. The mounting will be as shown in the following diagram:

Now it is very evident that whenever a person walks in from the door side to the room side the Sensor 1 will show a lower reading when detecting a body. Then, while he is walking towards the room side, Sensor 2 will...

Perfecting motion

Were you able to find any flaws in the previous code? They are not hard to find; the code works brilliantly when it's only a single person in the room. If this is installed somewhere where multiple people are coming and going, then it might be challenging. This is because whenever a person moves outside, the light will be turned off.

So now that the problem is evident, it's time to make the code even more better. To do this, the hardware will remain exactly the same; we simply need to make the code smarter. Let's see how we can do that:

import GPIO library
   import RPi.GPIO as GPIO
   import time
   import time
   import Adafruit_ADS1x15
   adc0 = Adafruit_ADS1x15.ADS1115()
GAIN = 1
 adc0.start_adc(0, gain=GAIN)
adc1.start_adc(1, gain=GAIN)
GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM)
GPIO.setwarnings(False)
PCount = 0
while True:
   F_value = adc0.get_last_result()
   F1 = (1.0 / (F_value / 13.15)) - 0.35
   time.sleep(0.1)
   F_value = adc0.get_last_result()
   F2 = (1.0 / (F_value / 13.15...

Summary

In this chapter, we enabled Jarvis to automate your home appliances under different conditions, also applying various properties to the system. So go on and try many other scenarios under which you can enhance your home automation system.

In the next chapter, we will enable Jarvis IoT, thus controlling the appliances from your mobile phone using Wi-Fi and the internet.