IoT Application with Tortoise Smart Home

Internet of Things (IoT) is the network of physical objects where data is collected through sensors from the physical world, transferred and handled through the Internet and scientific reactions are put back to real-world finally. As an important application area of IoT, smart home device leads a hot trend to facilitate our daily life and operate with more scientific and rational decisions than the human being. However, targets of the existing smart home devices are rarely animals or pets that involve significantly in modern life, and even less attention is given to uncommon pet varieties such as aquatic animals, amphibians and reptiles. To tackle this issue, this paper proposed a tortoise smart home device as an IoT application example to let pet tortoises enjoy a better living environment and make owners less worried about tortoises' life even if they are away from their pets. Considering habits of tortoises, the tortoise smart home device combines five main functions - temperature, land-water swap, water filtration, feeding and lighting, together with a website for owners' remote control and monitor. Design strategies and implementation details (including versions of Arduino microcontroller and different kinds of sensors and actuators) are demonstrated in the paper. Moreover, further ideas about how to easily extend the device and functions applicable for other pet varieties are also brought out.