Habitat Monitoring and Power Conservation Using Thermopile Sensor

Abstract

Reducing the power consumption of individuals and organizations is the major concern for engineers and developers today. This paper presents a novel, low cost solution to reduce the power consumption. This project is being built considering a software development company, but this is equally applicable to other industries and even homes. The fundamental technology which forms the basis of the project is a thermopile array sensor. The thermopile sensor mounted in a robotic vehicle is used in this project is capable of detecting objects and bodies emitting IR radiations in the wavelength range of 2 µm to 22 µm, which is the wavelength of radiated heat. Thus, a thermopile is capable of extracting the details of sources of heat, within a certain area. With the data from the thermopile array and by making a temperature histogram of a certain area, a human presence can be ascertained. The thermopile sensor mounted in the robotic vehicle constitutes the sensing module. In case if there is no human presence in a habitat the switch can be directly turned off from the control room via wireless network and so the power is conserved.