FYP: The idea

So, this is the first post in my blog for a very long time - mostly because I just finished placement, and now have the motivation and developed the work ethic to do this. It's a bit of a canvas for my final year project idea that I've been researching and developing slowly over the past few months. I now have a relatively solid idea.

So the gist of it is effectively a smarthouse with easy-to-develop, upgradable modules. The user will begin by interacting with a webapp, or an app on a smartphone. The user will be prompted my a control panel of sorts. Using the intuitive knobs and sliders they can change values for volume, light levels and even turn devices on and off. The way this works is by taking the values, once submitted, and pushing them to a web-based database. The central controller for the smarthouse (powered by a Raspberry Pi) has a script running that pulls data from the database every half second. It then pushes these values via serial to an Arduino. The Arduino then normalizes these values and pushes them to the various components connected to it. 

Here's a diagram demonstrating the process:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Logitech G502 Proteus Core Teardown & Scroll Wheel Replacement

Image
So I recently acquired a Logitech  G502  mouse, and I have to say I absolutely love it. It's a beautiful mouse, and a worth upgrade to my old G500s mouse. However my one gripe was the new all-metal scroll wheel. While the weight was nice, I missed the rubber ring around my old 500s. This led me to attempt to replace the new 502 scroll wheel with the old one from my busted 500s. So let's get started shall we? So as you can see, these are what the mice look like side-by side. While they look drastically different, the ergonomics are actually very similar among the two. The first step was to take the mouse feet off and unscrew the screws that hold the chassis in place.  Lever the feet off gently with a flathead screwdriver. And they just peel right off. There's four screws on the underside of the mouse.  So the feet are layered. There's double-sided adhesive foam, with the feet on top. On the back foot, I managed to peel off th
Read more

Turning a laptop screen into an external monitor.

Image
So my old Dell L502x died. However most of the components were fine, it's just the motherboard that seemed to be down with a case of water damage. So along with turning the chassis of the laptop into a dock/stand for my new laptop I wanted to turn the laptop's screen into an external monitor. So the first thing I did was extract the panel from the housing to take a look at the model number and the interface. If you're looking to do this yourself just look up the documentation for your laptop or go to ifixit.com  and look it up. Fortunately Dell has excellent documentation and a pretty straightforward teardown process.
Read more

FYP: Working out Modules

Here's a little list of how I expect some of the modules to work: Master controller: Phone/Webapp -> PHP POST -> SQLdb entry Master receiver: Network capable Arduino/Pi sends several requests to the web DB per second.   Lights RGB bulb/strip along ceiling/wall join 4 pin input -> Arduino -> Wireless transimtter  (RasPI?/Wifi Sheild) -> Phone Sound Servo hooked up to volume knob 4 pin input -> Arduino -> Wireless transimtter  (RasPI?/Wifi Sheild) -> Phone Food Fridge Weight sensors under products to detect quantity and presence. Notification  when supplies are runing low Cooking Grill turns on at schedueled/dictated times. Leave food in grill in the morning Movement motion dectors door open /closed  sensors Security IP cameras - this will also help with keeping an eye on plants/oven/other time sensitive applications.
Read more