Building the demonstrator
The time was there to build the indoor climate lamp. Now it comes down to what materials should be used. One thing that is for sure is that the arduino is used to receive the input from the Xbee modules. The logical thing to do is use the arduino to control the output.
For the output a light is chosen that can be seen during the daylight and would give a nice fluent glow when lit. Here at the spire institute they had a 3W RGB LED that meets the requirements. The only downside is the heat it produces, together with the transistors to drive the 350 mA current.
The material for the diffusion of the light was also a coincidence. In the research center was a piece of rest material they used for a projector screen which breaks the light in a fluent way. The only challenge left was to find the right material for the base.
Another electronic challenge was the power supply. The LEDs need approximately 3V per channel at 350mA. This comes down to roughly 1A per LED. In this case 5 of these are used so a 5A power supply was necessary to only drive the LEDs. Not alone 3V was needed, but also 9~12V for the powering of the sensor boxes. The best way to go is an old power supply from a computer. It has all these power levels and can deliver enough amps per line, plus at a university are enough old computers lying around that can be scavenged.
The sensor boxes are made out of foamcore which gives them a neutral look from a shape and color point of view. People should not reflect on the object but should use the object to talk about the indoor climate. The lamp should follow this neutral language.
The first try was to use 3mm foamcore to create the base. This turned out to be a precise job and was taking too much time to cut it neatly. The other downside is the durability of the material. It dents easily which makes it not the ideal material for transportation.
During the ITD course I worked with a lasercutter to cut the materials from flat material and glued the whole thing together as a big puzzle. The material was changed to something more durable but still easy to finish, MDF.
Denmark, or at least Sønderborg, was not the best place to find a lasercutter that could cut MDF. The decision was made to do this at a company in the Netherlands.
With all the loose parts together the big fun of building could start.
Inspiration
Because the plan is to build a lamp that responds to Indoor Climate factors, this seems useful for inspiration. Also controlled by an Arduino.
Hackea a lamp oriented Arduino workshop from AlluvioneMediatica on Vimeo.
Meeting Froukje and Walter
Since I was in the Netherlands for my moving, I had the opportunity to do a coach-chair meeting. Here are the notes I made during the meeting.
The provotypes should be integrated in the daily life of the users. Why is provocation over time that important? One moment of intervention could make all the difference. For example the pink blockage at Rotterdam central station works very well. It makes you think about who is working on it, who is doing the construction. On top of this was a guy in a #1 suit running over the station making people aware that some tracks are closed.
The reasoning about the time aspect should be improved and supported, because this is what makes it unique. There should be something about learning by doing over time, to reflect on its usage.
Possible room for Confusius?
What I hear I forget,
What I see I remember,
What I do I understand.
Philips has a prove/probe department that is working on future concepts. It is could be inspiring to see how they are working with provocative prototypes and their usage in big companies like Philips.
Comfort has a strong relation with culture. For example the amount of light that is being perceived as comfortable during dinner is different. An Italian restaurant in Italy is very light in contrary to an American Italian restaurant where the lighting is very weak.
Philip Ross did a research about how people organize their home environment for his home atmosphere controller. This could be interesting to look at because comfort is what people make and how they arrange their life inside of the home.
The focus of the project lies on the theory about how to get the best provocation. Don’t lose it out of sight. The IC project is just a carrier for this. Try to get feedback from the business partners on the outcome of the study, otherwise there is no use for the method. Try to ‘defend’ what the use is of a multi-interpretable object in the fuzzy frontend.
Froukje gave me a copy of Ianus Keller's promotion thesis, which also has a chapter about the usage of prototypes in the design process. Thanks again for that.
Comfort is… Results of the etnographic study
The comfort themes are made to sum up the main areas of comfort that arose from the user studies. Because the titles are quite ambiguous I will elaborate on them a bit more after the break.
- Comfort is what people make
- Comfort is bringing feeling, observing and understanding in tune
- Comfort is about social relations
- Comfort is a political construct
- Indoor comfort connects to the outdoor
- Comfort means becoming healthy
Business Partners Overview
Next is a short explanation of every stakeholder with their area of interest and current products.
| www.velux.com | Company
Velux is specialized in windows and blinds. Their focus now lies on sustainable living. They look at a house from a holistic viewpoint with energy efficiency, healthy indoor climate and renewable energy as main points of interest. |
| Products
Their product range can be split in two, the windows and blinds. They are in the consumer and business to business market. Windows
Blinds
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| www.isover.com | Company
Isover is specialized in thermal and sound insulation. Their strategy is to design energy efficient constructions, to provide safe comfort for users and to help protect the environment. They are in the home and business to business market. Their interest is not only in new buildings but also in renovating old ones. |
Products
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| www.nilan.dk | Company
Nilan is specialized in Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems. Their focus lies on saving energy and move away from fossil fuels and still contribute to a comfortable indoor climate. They are interested mostly in the business two business markets. |
| Products
Their HVAC systems can be split up in two, domestic and industrial systems. Domestic These are active ventilation systems with an integrated heat pump to warm the building up during the winter and cool it down in the summer. Inside is also a filter that removes odours, particles and moisture. Exhaust air can heat up the hot water supply. Industrial Mechanical ventilation units that size from 1.000 up to 50.000 m3/h of air. |
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| www.windowmaster.com | Company
WindowMaster is specialized in controlled natural ventilation. Natural air improves the wellbeing of people indoor. Their solutions are based on the natural forces and therefore have a considerable lower energy usage than mechanical solutions. |
| Products
Their products are integrated automated natural ventilation. They range from sensors (rain and other outdoor sensors) to actuators (motors to adjust windows or blinds) and control panels or remotes. |
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| www.grontmij-carlbro.com | Company
Grontmij-Carl Bro are engineering and management consultants that make sure cities and countries develop in a sustainable way to improve the life of the individual as well as society as a whole. Their mission is to future-proof the quality of life. |
| Products
They give their advice whether it fits the guidelines on new and renovation of existing buildings. Comfort is not yet defined and therefore interesting to them. |
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| www.dtu.dk | Their interest lies mainly in making a rationale about how to quantify indoor comfort. This integrated scale should make comfort measurable. |
| www.sdu.dk | Their interest lies mainly in the soft values that play a role in the indoor climate. What do people appreciate and why when looking at the indoor climate. It is not only about the parameters, but also the people and their actions within the indoor environment. How to make new solutions fit people’s way of living? |
Provocation
Sorry for not posting my first ideas, but I think this is also one important part that was still missing. Inspiration that looks at provocation.
Bill Viola - Ocean without a shore.
This piece is about the contradictory meaning of the altar. They are in one hand a place to pray and worship the death and in the other hand the tomb of a dead person. This piece is setup in a very small chapel where 103" screens are mounted above the altars. It shows how thin the layer between life and death is by letting people in black and white (almost ghostlike) walk through a water curtain to get from the dead to the living (high resolution full colour image, very detailed). It should make people think about their own mortality. I also like the provocation of the technology that is implemented in the chapel's most sacred place, the altar.
Participatory User Etnography With Artefacts
Cultural Probes Method Card
Here are the method cards I was planning to make. This gives a brief overview of how to integrate users in the fuzzy front end of the design process.
From this I am planning to make a comparison to provotyping as I see it. Here is the full list in PDF
X-Bee, the final chapter?
Here another update on the X-Bee’s. Last week I got a point to point communication. The API mode did not have much advantage over the AT mode for now if everything is broadcasted over the network with an identifier so that the destination node can pick it up by looking at its identifier. Maybe it’s not the full advantage of the X-Bee but it will suffice for now.
Last Thursday everything worked without any problems. I checked the range which indeed is about 20 meters without data loss from two different routers sent to one coordinator. So the next step was to let the two routers communicate and give an output from each other’s sensors. Here things got messy. I managed to change the CTS and RTS properties of the serial communication which led to mayhem. The X-Bee’s could not be found, unable to communicate with the computer and therefore ‘bricked’. I decided to let it rest in the weekend and put on my bravest boots and tried it again. This time with a little help of google which came up with some reset functionality which turned to also not work. After some ‘maybe try this’-help I finally got it. Keep pressing the reset switch and force the firmware from X-CTU which did the trick after 3 times. So now I am back to where I was two days ago.
In the meantime the breakout boards from sparkfun arrived and are soldered. If the modules I have now are working properly and respond to each other, I can try to make standalone (end) nodes. Fortunately this is the only electronics obstacle I encountered until now. I want to finish this X-Bee by making a demonstrator that is linked to exploring the indoor climate. How is going to be in the next post.
Home inspiration
Amongst the standard sites I check every day is the howstuffworks website. On this was an interesting atricle about 'wacky home inventions'. These should increase the indoor living comfort. Which I think is related to the project in a wider scope.
Most of them are just hilarious, but there is an idea behind them, probably 
.
Pocock, Jennifer. "Top 10 Wacky Inventions for the Home." 29 July 2008. HowStuffWorks.com. 23 March 2010.
X-Bee part II
As you could have read in the previous post I was wondering how to make more advantage of the ZigBee protocol. The first was to look at the difference between the AT and API mode.
API stands for application programming interface and is an alternative to default transparent mode (AT). The difference is that it allows the programmer to change parameters of the X-Bee without entering command mode as is necessary in AT mode. The main advantage is that data is being transmitted in packets instead of direct serial data. Every packet is checked upon delivery and a confirmation is returned.
I am not sure whether the AT mode also has the same functionality. AT mode is much easier because it can be sent directly as a string instead of being transformed in the API frame with a beginning, end, identifier and a checksum.
The breakout boards for the X-bee modules have been ordered to make it standalone motes instead of arduino operated. I think this will take about a week before the boards from sparkfun are here. In the meantime I am working on other things like finding a useful x-bee library for the arduino that can send signals to specific devices by an ID instead of an IM with a low and high value. I am going to dive in the arduino playground/forum for that.
There is another breakthrough in the sensor arduino-sensor readout area. I managed to get an FSR (or any other analogue resistor) working on the arduino and make it send its data when it is requested by another X-Bee module. Just like a STH71 temperature/humidity sensor which seemed quite complicated with a clock and data signal. In the end it was just finding the right arduino library. Open source makes my design life much much much easier.
Arduino with Xbee and Analogue Sensors (CO2, FSR, Temp/Humid)