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Current state of trial infrastructure in nottingham; plans for cambridge and china
[Back to Agenda](January video conference update)
Progress has been made on acquiring sensing infrastructure for the Horizon workspace, designing/implementing a web-based database for sensor data, and on planning display design activities.
Acquiring and deploying sensor infrastructure is phase 1 of the work-plan (months 4-9). We are currently in month 6.
The Sir Colin Campbell Building (where Horizon is currently based) is monitored generally through the University's building management system (BMS). Unfortunately, like most of the University buildings, only the main meters in the building are monitored (i.e. only the electricity load for the entire building is recorded).
We want more detailed data, so have been investigating sensing infrastructures similar to M2M. Many of the TEDDI projects have bought/intend to buy monitoring equipment from AlertMe. The AlertMe equipment consists of a Hub, a meter sensor, and individual appliance monitors (IAMs). The meter sensor and IAMs send data wirelessly to the hub (Zigbee), which uses a broadband connection to send data to the AlertMe-hosted database. AlertMe charge a monthly subscription fee for this service. We are not comfortable with this business model, and when we investigated these products AlertMe had no IAMs available. We also considered Current Cost who have a similar product range to AlertMe; at the time of investigation they were not selling IAMs (although they are now available). The Current Cost hub appears to only send aggregate load to the web (Pachube, limiting its usefulness for monitoring individual appliances), although this is expected to change. Essentially, both AlertMe and Current Cost are affordable options for domestic monitoring but lack flexibility required to be easily used for our purposes.
Following consideration of these cheaper options, we chose to buy equipment from Green Energy Options, who produce more expensive but more flexible monitoring kit for domestic and commercial settings. GEO kit also consists of a hub, meter sensor and IAMs, but the sensor and IAMs connect to the hub using Powerline rather than wireless. The GEO kit also includes circuit monitors: these will allow monitoring of lighting. We have purchased equipment to monitor the following spaces:
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Horizon workspace (one meeting room and coffee space, 4 single-occupant offices, one 3-person office, two open-plan offices (approx. 10 people in each))
- We intend to use IAMs to monitor use of communal appliances (e.g. coffee machine) and plug sockets in communal areas; we also intend to focus on a small number of staff and monitor all personal appliances used by these staff
- We will use circuit monitors to monitor use of all lighting
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Domestic spaces
- We have purchased equipment to monitor circuits and a small number of appliances in 4 homes; these will be Horizon staff homes
The equipment has been paid for but has not yet been installed: GEO are working to modify the hubs so that they send data to our web database, rather than their own servers. Once the equipment has been installed we will publish technical specifications of the equipment and a specification of the data that the sensors/IAMs generate.
Implementing a database to hold the data produced by monitoring infrastructures is phase 2 of the workplan (months 4-12)
Following our positive experiences with previous Horizon projects, we intend to set up an Amazon EC2 server instance to host a MySQL database to hold data from the Horizon and domestic sensing infrastructures. This instance will also host Java servlets (via Tomcat) which will provide interfaces to the database.
A schema for this database is being developed by James Colley based on the structure of data produced by GEO equipment, and on discussions with other TEDDI project researchers. There is a desire within the TEDDI group to agree on a common database structure so that data might be shared between projects in the future.
Prototyping display UIs is phase 3 of the workplan (months 7-15)
We have started planning the participatory design activities. We currently anticipate that we will carry out two types of design activities with staff from Horizon, Cambridge and China Mobile:
- Email activities: these will be short private exercises sent to individual staff members which ask them to draw a diagram, write a short piece of text or answer some questions; these will help the Horizon researchers to have a basic understanding of the staff's current relationship with energy use.
- Paper prototyping workshops: these will be longer exercises where staff will be brought together in groups to explore potential designs for the C-Aware displays.
We are developing a time-line for these activities.
We are currently exploring the existing sensor infrastructure in the William Gates Building to assess whether we can use this to gather data for the displays, or whether new infrastructure needs to be installed.
Cambridge will provide a description of the current sensing infrastructure. This has now been provided and can be found here
Horizon have been asked to provide China Mobile with a technical description of the planned web-server, to determine how it can be ported to a form that is suitable for hosting by China Mobile. China Mobile have also asked for a technical specification of the GEO monitoring kit.
China Mobile have provided contacts for the following areas:
- Qin xiangang - responsibility for User Experience Lab (will help with organising the paper prototyping workshop)
- Jiang haining & Cheng liang - for discussions about M2M
- Chen su & Hu keyun - for discussions about web data store