Android Applications for Automation Purposes

In recent years, the number of network-enabled smartphones everywhere has been increasing fast. With the rapid expansion of the Internet, people have been trying to reduce manual intervention as much as possible. A variety of sensors are embedded in today’s smartphones which make interfacing with the outside world, easy. The majority of the smartphone users have Android as the operating system. So in the world of smartphone Android has the largest platform as compared to other operating systems. So in this project work Android is used to automate some of the simple day to day manual activities. The thesis represents the design and development of simple android applications which are used to automate simple tasks. All the applications are compatible with Android 2.1 onwards. The designs of the proposed applications are on top of a Web interface which uses RESTful API as the communication protocol between client applications and web service. The applications take much advantage of sensors and techniques pre-installed in Android smartphones. The proposed applications follow optimizations according to the best practices recommended by Google, to increase user experience and reduce power consumption. The first one is PVSys, an Android application which gives the details of equipment required for solar pump installation at user’s backyard or a full solar panel installation at user’s house. The second one is BizCard, which automates the task of storing user’s business cards in digital form and retrieving the contacts when required. The third application, Auto Attendance Manager, automates the task of taking attendance for the teachers and lecturers without the aid of any external device. The Auto Attendance Manager can be integrated easily with the present application of the Institute.Automation of simple things with Android becomes easy. Moreover, a layman can work on Android interface since it is easy to implement and design the layouts. In today’s world when every device is trying to communicate its information to the internet, Android interface with Bluetooth or Wi-Fi can be used for the sam