• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.9
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• pp.107-115
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• 2013

Smart appliances with multi-media and telecommunication equipments provide users complicated convenience functions. On the contrary, 8-bit controller-based low performance electronics still cannot afford such multimedia and telecommunication. If we find a way to have low-end electronics connected and provide complicated functions, they can be also made "smart". Fortunately, 8-bit controllers used in low-end appliances have UART, which can be connected to any of BlueTooth, Wi-Fi and ZigBee communication modules which can, in turn, communicate with smart devices. Any communication module can be attached to the low-end electronics due to the variety of smart devices' connectivity at the other side. Although the convenience functions seem complicated, they are actually macros in a script form composed of micro commands which implement the base functions of appliances. Since the kinds of the base functions are not that many, the low-end electronic appliances will become "smart" if their control program can be extended to execute sequentially the micro commands in any combination. Such simple innovation has not seen the world, until now due to the overhead of the additionally required hardware such as display devices and buttons. The high-quality display and touch screen functionalities of smart devices can replace the required hardware, and remove the overhead completely. In fact, the low-end appliances become smart as if an "evolution kit" is newly equipped.