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Fault Detection System in an Optical Fiber

Using Arduino

Article in International Journal of Applied Engineering Research November 2015

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 International Journal of Applied Engineering Research, ISSN 0973-4562 Vol. 10 No.44 (2015)
Research India Publications; httpwww.ripublication.comijaer.htm

Fault Detection System in an Optical Fiber Using

Arduino
Kaliprasanna Swain 1, Jagannath Sahoo2, M.V.S.V Prasad 3, Gopinth Palai 4
Asst. Prof, Dept. of ECE, GITA, Bhubaneswar 1, Student, GITA, Bhubaneswar 2, Student,
GITA, Bhubaneswar 3, Prof, Dept. of ECE, GITA, Bhubaneswar 4
kaliprasanna_ece@gita.edu.in 1, jagannath.sahoo@live.com 2, saiprasad1996@hotmail.com 3,
gpalai28@gmail.com 4
09438479580 , 09439231141 2, 09439045711 3, 09439045946 4
1

tremendous financial loss in business for the service

Abstract This paper proposed an intelligent fault detection
system using Arduino in optical fiber communication. The idea providers.
behind this fault invigilating module is to monitor the received We are proposing the intelligent fault detecting system in an
power supply in optical fiber. For this purpose the Arduino UNO optical fiber to find the exact location of fault in the fiber optic
which consists of Atmega 328 microcontroller is used along with
the sensor unit. The output of the sensor is designed and
cable. Among the various parameters we are going to monitor
simulated by employing Proteus ISIS simulators to monitor the the Received power of fiber optic cable. Likewise, we can use
received power supply in the optical fiber. The sensor unit is used different parameters to monitor the fault in that cable.
for the simulation consists of a LDR along with an opamp. If there
are any abrupt changes in power of optical line, the fault message II. SYSTEM OVERVIEW
is displayed on the LCD which is interfaced with Arduino and at
the same time the date and time of fault occurrence will be
transferred to the web server.

Index Terms Arduino UNO, Fault monitoring, Optical

Fiber, Sensor, Web Server.

I. INTRODUCTION
The principle of fiber-optic communication is based on the
transportation of the signal through an optical fiber from one
part to another. The light is a form of electromagnetic carrier
wave which is modulated to carry out information. Optical
fiber is mostly deployed to transmit telephone signals. The
optical fiber has ample advantages over existing copper wire
in long-distance and high-demand applications due to much
lower attenuation and interference. Fiber-optic
communication systems have primarily been installed over
long-distance applications, because of its infrastructure
development within cities was relatively time-consuming and
difficult, and fiber-optic systems were expensive and complex
to install and operate, still fiber is an integral part of modern
day communication infrastructure and can be found along
roads, in buildings, hospitals and machinery. The optic fiber
is a strand of silica based glass surrounded by transparent
cladding and its dimensions is similar to those of a human
hair. Light can be transmitted along the fiber over great
distances at very high data rates, providing an impeccable
medium for the transport of information.
Today, optical fiber technologies play a key role in opening
up real broadband access to the end user [1] [2]. Monitoring
and identification against fiber fault is essential for
continuous service delivery to customers. Therefore, any
service outage due to a fiber fault can be translated into a
Fig. 1. System Block Diagram
The principle of fault detection is clearly envisaged from
Fig. 1, where the sensor, converts the light signal into its
equivalent voltage and after amplification, it fed into the
Arduino UNO development board for further processing.
Then, the Arduino compares the voltage with a threshold
voltage, if it fell below that, it communicated to the server
through the virtual serial port with a fault message. Every time
Arduino is getting the voltage from the sensor output, the
value is displayed on the LCD also.
A. Sensor:
It is the most important part of our application which converts
the optical source into equivalent voltage. Mostly a
photodiode is used for the measurement of the power received
from an optical fiber from the customer side. The photodiode
is very much sensitive towards light. The photo diode will
give a corresponding voltage signal in the range of mV or V.

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This small voltage is again amplified with the help of an
amplifier. In this paper an Operational amplifier of IC model
LF411 is used for the same. But due the unavailability of the
photo diode in the Proteus simulation software a LDR is used
for the simulation process. LDR is having a property of
showing high resistance in the dark and the resistance goes
down in the presence of light. In the simulation, for both dark
light and bright light are tested.
Fig. 2. Circuit Diagram of Sensor
Fig. 2 shows an opamp which is used an integrator with DC
gain control is connected to the LDR and used for signal
amplification purposes. The feedback network comprises of
the parallel combination of resistance and capacitance. It is an
AC integrator i.e., a sinusoidal input waveform will produce
another sine wave as its output will be 90o out-of-phase with
the input producing cosine wave.
B. Arduino Microcontroller:
Arduino is an open-source physical computing [3] [4]
platform based on a simple microcontroller board and a
development environment that implements the processing
language. It was originally meant for artists and designers to
create electronic prototypes. They would be able to create
these designs easily with a little knowledge of programming
and electronics without going too deep into it. Electronic
prototyping was traditionally only associated with
engineering and engineers. Arduino microcontroller is an
Open Source electronics mixed hardware and software
platform for the development and research. The programming
language of Arduino is based on a simplified version of
C/C++. Merely a few commands are required for
programming the Arduino to perform in some useful
application.
In this paper, we use the Arduino UNO [5] which is a
microcontroller board based on the Atmega 328. It bears a
16 MHz ceramic resonator, 14 digital input/output pins (of
which 6 can be used as PWM outputs), 6 analog inputs, an
ICSP (in-circuit serial programming) header, a power jack, a
USB connection, and a reset button. A general Arduino board
contains every unit to support the microcontroller for any
application; simply connect it to a computer with a USB cable
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or power it with an AC-to-DC adapter or battery to get started.
So it became a first choice for engineers. Analog pins are
capable of reading in 1024 bits and digital writing capability
of 256 bit.
C. Proteus ISIS Simulation
Proteus is a software package developed by Labcenter
Electronics, for computer-aided design, schematic capture,
microcontroller simulation, and printed circuit board (PCB)
layout design.
The Proteus Design Suite includes:
ISIS (Intelligent Schematic Input System) - A
schematic capture tool with the possibility to
simulate programmable ICs like Microchip PIC,
Atmel AVR (ATmega8, ATmega32, or
ATtiny2313) etc. The component library includes
claims to about 10,000 circuit components with
6000 Prospice Simulation models [6].
VSM (Virtual System Modelling) Provides a
graphical SPICE circuit simulation and animation
directly in the ISIS environment.
ARES (Advance Routing and Editing Software) - for
PCB layouts. It is to use drag and drop, hardware
accelerated and allowed "Shape Based" auto routing
and auto placement.
ISIS provides the development environment for PROTEUS
VSM [7], a revolutionary interactive system level simulator.
It permits the simulation of complete micro-controller based
design by combining the mixed mode circuit simulation,
interactive component models and microprocessor models.
ISIS provides the platform for real time interactive simulation
and a system for managing the source and object code
associated with each project. In summation, a number of
graphical objects can be ordered on the schematic to set,
frequency, conventional time and swept variable simulation to
be performed.
D. Web Server (My SQL Server)
In this paper, we used a server to log data into the database.
For hosting purposes locally, XAMPP [8] is used which is a
completely easy to use package of Apache web server,
MySQL, PHP and Perl. It is a completely free, community
built Software package used for deployment of Web
applications.
In case of data storage, MySQL database is used. MySQL [9]
is again free and open source software licensed under GPL
(version 2) and owed by Oracle Corporation. SQL is
abbreviated as Structured Query Language which is basically
a language used to execute queries to store data onto a
database. MySQL is terminal based DBMS so its data
structure can be visualized using a third party web application
such as phpmyadmin. MySQL database is used to log the
data, but a popular server side scripting language PHP is used
to fetch and display data.
For Interfacing from hardware to the web/Local server, Java
Programming language is used. Java [10] is a platform
independent programming language which means program
written for one platform can be deployed on another platform
without any problem. We used a pre-written Java Library
 International Journal of Applied Engineering Research, ISSN 0973-4562 Vol. 10 No.44 (2015)
Research India Publications; httpwww.ripublication.comijaer.htm
jSSC (Java Simple Serial Connector) [11] which is again an
open source library for Serial Communication.

III. CIRCUIT DESCRIPTION WITH FLOW CHART

Fig. 4. Total Circuit Diagram

The Arduino device driver is so designed that it automatically

Fig. 3. Work flow diagram
A. Steps
Fig. 3 represents the steps involved in this work.
Initialize the sensor and get the equivalent analog
output voltage.
Initialize Arduino and read the analog value.
Check the condition by comparing with threshold
voltage and display it on the LCD.
If condition true, the fault information is sent to the
local host and web server as well.
If the condition is false, then no change in the
database.
converts USB to Serial port communication. The Arduino
program is written in the C++ programming language. The
function serial.print (); when executed sends the data from
Arduino to a computer through the serial port. Then the data is
received from Arduino using a custom built Java program
which responds the serial port to which Arduino is connected.
The serial port has to be set manually when executed first
time. Then the Java program executes the necessary My SQL
commands to store data into the database. A scripting
language PHP is used to design the database.
IV. SIMULATION RESULT
Due to the unavailability of the photo diode in Proteus ISIS
Simulation, in this work, a LDR (light dependent resistor) is
used to convert the light signal into its equivalent voltage.
LDR is a resistor whose resistance is dependent on light. The
resistance of LDR varies depending upon light intensity. The
Fig. 5 shows the simulation result under bright light which
indicates a case of fault on the LCD and Fig. 6 represents the
simulation under dark light, resulting no fault on the LCD.

B. Circuit Descriptions
The LDR output after amplification at opamp (LF411), is
connected to the analog input pin (A0) of the Arduino board.
The communication between Arduino board and computer is
made through the USB (A) USB (B) Port. The display unit
LCD which is connected to the Arduino board used to display
the sensed output. The VDD pin of the LCD is connected to the
+5V supply on the Arduino Board, the VEE and R/W pins are
connected to the ground. The RS and enable pin of the LCD
are connected with pin13 and 12 of the Arduino board,
respectively. Now the pins of DB4, DB5, DB6, and DB7 of
LCD are connected to digital pin of Arduino i.e. to pin5, pin4,
pin3, pin2 respectively for the 4 bits of communication.

Fig. 5. Full simulated output of LDR under bright light

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 International Journal of Applied Engineering Research, ISSN 0973-4562 Vol. 10 No.44 (2015)
Research India Publications; httpwww.ripublication.comijaer.htm

Fig. 8. Update of database by simulation method

V. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP

Fig. 6. Full simulated output of LDR under dark light

In this experimental setup, a Scientech 2502 Fiber Optic
Communication kit is used which is an advanced Fiber Optic
Fig. 7 shows the data is transmitted from virtual serial port kit is basically designed to learn the communication
to the database created by a PHP script at local host. Also, it techniques in Fiber Optics.
is noted that the database and the PHP script are used for
testing purposes only at locally. The Arduino program when
executed, it sends the data containing the output voltage and
fault information to the COM PORT at that instant.

Fig. 9. Experimental setup

Fig. 7. Reading of data by Virtual Serial port
The Java program now reads data at COMM PORT and sends
to the database. On the first run the Java program, it asks for
the COM PORT to set to which Arduino board is connected.
The program is written in such a manner that it only update the
database with date and time of fault occurrence when there is
a fault otherwise it does nothing. The Fig. 8 shows the
database with date, time, and voltage and fault information.
The above Fig. 9 shows an experimental set up for this
project, where Scientech 2502 Fiber Optic Communication
kit is used by Arduino MEGA development board. The input
and output both are taken as an analog voltage. From the Fig.
9, it is also revealed that if the threshold voltage goes below
3.1V (threshold voltage), the time and date both communicate
to the local host and also at the same time the LCD displays
the received signal voltage output along with fault
information.

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 International Journal of Applied Engineering Research, ISSN 0973-4562 Vol. 10 No.44 (2015)
Research India Publications; httpwww.ripublication.comijaer.htm
Fig. 10 shows the Java script is running and fault information REFERENCES
is also transferred to the server.
[1] G.baskaran, R.seethalakshmi, Intelligent fault detecting
system in an Optical fiber Journal of Theoretical and Applied
Information Technology, 15 May 2012. Vol. 39 No.2
[2] A. Premadi, Ng B. Chuan, M.S.
Ab-Rahman, M.N.MSaupe, K. Jumari,
Web services for monitoring system in opticalcommunicatio
n", International Conference on Space Science and
Communication, 26 October 2009 , Page 67 - 70
[3] A.A. Galadima, Arduino as a learning tool, International
Conference on Electronics, Computer and Computation
(ICECCO), 2014, page 1-4
[4] W. Durfee, Arduino Microcontroller Guide available in
www.me.umn.edu/courses/me2011/arduino/
[5] Arduino UNO,
http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/arduinoBoardUno
[6] Proteus ISIS available at
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteus_%28Software%29#ISIS_
.28Intelligent_Schematic_Input_System.29
[7] ISIS User Manual, Issue 6.0 - November 2002, Labcenter
Electronics
[8] XAMPP, available at
Fig. 10. Update of Database by Experimental method
https://www.apachefriends.org/index.html
[9] MySQL, available at http://www.mysql.com/
[10] Java, available at http://java.com/en/
VI. CONCLUSION [11] jSSC, available at
http://code.google.com/p/java-simple-serial-connector/
An intelligent fault detection system using Arduino in optical
fiber is implemented in this paper. The principle of fault
monitoring module is thoroughly explored here. Total circuit
diagram including sensor, ISIS simulator and Arduino
microcontroller are vividly discussed. Arduino programming
language (C++) is used to obtain the output and also to display
the same on the LCD. At the same time a JAVA program is
also executed to carry the output from Arduino to computer
through serial port and to MySQL database as well, which is
designed using a scripting language PHP.

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