RhomeforDencity at Maker Faire Rome - LIFE DIGITAL MIRROR

Life Digital Mirror

Introduction

Our experience part by the excellent results obtained at the Solar Decathlon Europe 2012 in Madrid Team MED in Ital. In this prototype was attributed considerable importance to monitoring and data storage. In order to get a feeling of the actual design choices we thought it was necessary a real-time monitoring of energy consumption of the building and bioclimatic conditions.

During the competition, team members could access via a web interface, a comprehensive database of dynamic 3D model and realize the trend of everything that happened inside the house, deciding, for example, when he should to turn appliances on the basis of the electrical output of the PV system.

Our philosophy

RhOMEfordenCity  house will mostly rely on an efficient passive behaviour, and this would be useless, without people. That’s why we want to recall the know-how that our Grandmothers had. They knew very well, from instinct, but mostly from tradition, if and how to open curtains, let the air pass through, and so on.

There is no more need to exclude users, in order to introduce technology and intelligence in these systems. The new digital consciousness can marry, in our approach, the environmental awareness. The behaviour should always be available, and people should be able to share it, or parts of it, in a social platform. We imagine the house as a node of a network of homes, all connected between them. Social involvement today is crucial in technology, and energy saving systems have to become part of this scenario.

We have purposely decided to automatize only  the monitoring leaving to human operators the choice about reactions. Infact  automatization of reactions would be quite expensive. Moreover leaving to users freedom about the reaction to adopt in any specific case (open the windows, turn off some lights, …) would be educative for pupils.

It will be a great opportunity for students at the end of their academic careers with a lot of formative and educational purposes. They will be able to prove their knowledge and to put into practice many learnt subjects with the advantage of having detailed data about what they’re studying and the flexibility of such a powerful board.
 

First steps

Arduino Uno   WiFi Shield          Meteo Shield

1. METEO SHIELD: - building
   
   - scripting: send data to PC

2. WIFI SHIELD: - building
   
   - scripting: send data from meteo shield to web API/XML

3. LIGHT SENSOR: - building on auxiliary Arduino board
   
   (gy30) - scripting: send data to pc

4. JOIN SENSORS: - link gy30 to meteo shield
   
   - scripting: send data to pc

5. AIR QUALITY: - building on auxiliary Arduino board
   
   SENSOR - scripting: send data to pc
   
   (tpm300e)

6. JOIN MORE: - link tpm300e to meteo shield
   
   SENSORS - scripting: send data to pc

7. SHARE DATA: - set up Emoncms Dashboard
   
   - scripting: send data to web API/XML

8. WEBGL : - build a BIM model of our work room
   
   INTERFACE - export BIM model to WEBGL interface
   
   

Arduino and Firefly

Arduino is an open source framework that enables rapid prototyping and learning fast of the basic principles of electronics and programming. It consists of a hardware platform for physical computing developed at the Interaction Design Institute, a postdoctoral training based Ivrea, founded by Olivetti and Telecom Italy. The tab name is derived from that of a bar Ivrea (which in turn invokes the name of Arduino d'Ivrea, King of Italy in 1002) attended by some of the founders of the project. The Arduino team is composed of Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, Tom Igoe, Gianluca Martino, and David Mellis. The project began: in Ivrea in Italy 2005 with the aim to make available, interaction design projects created by students, a control device that was cheaper than prototyping systems then available.

Life Digital Mirror at MakerfaireRome

Next steps

For these reasons, the house is designed to hold two different monitoring configurations called “Digital Life Mirror” (DLM) and “Discovery Digital Mirror” (DDM). During the competition we will install both systems that will use two independent control units situated in the 3D core, or otherwise there will be only the first of them in the aggregated version of the dwelling. The purpose of these solutions is not to replace humans in the house management, but to provide exhaustive information to let the dweller have an aware and guided use of the environment in which he lives. People should be let free to be wrong and make mistakes! But be in control of their life. The introduction, in cars, of the simple display showing instant and cumulative fuel consumption, had a demonstrated great impact on the driver savings, but there is no system that limitates directly their possibility to go fast if they want. Life is complex and rich, every attempt to de-humanize it, will definitely fail.

Life Digital Mirror (LDM) is a simple but complete monitoring system for the best end-user awareness about what’s going on in the house.

The LDM system will record all consumption information in a complete way. Among these, it’s interesting to analyze the overall water demand divided into clear water and grey water. We will install flowmeters near the tanks in order to detect the actual consumption and to highlight how much grey water it’s possible to recover. For the future we are considering to put flowmeters in the terminals of each appliance which use water to have a more detailed view of the usage.

LDM will also monitor doors and windows so the end user knows if they are closed or open and he could be advised about what to do for the best dwelling temperature. For this purpose we will use reed sensors placed on every window and on the most significant doors.

Other important informations are related to the photovoltaic system, a key component of the house, that will be carefully monitored. There will be information about the real time production of electricity that will be recorded in order to have an easily consultable history online.

Thanks to these data and to measurements on the appliances, the control unit will show in real time the amount of external power needed by the dwelling. It will also be interesting to evaluate the panels’ performance changing their tilting for best efficiency according to the environmental conditions of the solar radiation.

ddm

Discovery Digital Mirror is a more complex monitoring system designed to collect data for scientific and educational purposes.

We will install temperature sensors on the windows, on the surface and inside the walls and in each room placed at different heights to evaluate the uniformity of the environmental conditions and the effectiveness of air conditioning .

In the same way of LDM system, DDM will monitor if doors and windows are open or closed in order to understand the relationship between these and the dwelling temperature.

In this way we can have a complete view of what’s going on in the house, like the mechanic when it reads the data from our car and runs a diagnostic.