Lighting Control System for Energy Saving

The surge of consumer electronics market has placed a heavy burden on the already stretched energy demand. In view of the depleting fossil fuel reserves and the scarcity of non renewable resources, Engineers face a challenge to conserve energy at the design stage and at the utilization stage. Since consumers are pre occupied with their professions they need automated systems to take care of the energy consumption and make their life easy. This projects aim is to develop an energy saving device using a microcontroller for a room in which lights and other utilities are used. The sensors which provide inputs to the microcontroller detect the occupancy and other environmental conditions and logically control the output circuits. The program is written so that the inputs and outputs are controlled to optimize the energy consumption by switching the lighting and equipment appropriately by cutting off energy wasted. Collected data showed that this device helps to reduce the energy consumption. Though the prototype is demonstrated with LEDs indicating outputs, the actual product include peripheral components which meet the load ratings of the equipment to which the control system is connected. This paper presents one of such systems implemented using microcontrollers and embedded programming.