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Week 1The topic 'Energy Services via the Internet' was finalised on Wednesday. A first meeting was arranged with our supervisor on Friday. We discussed the background of the project as explained in our background section.The rest of
the week involved background reading on some of the technologies involved:
Broadband, e-Box, etc.
Week 2Monday's meeting was a further discussion of the scope of the project. We agreed to provide a number of our own ideas for project, based on our background reading.It was agreed to get down to background reading in earnest, splitting up the project for each team member to cover an area preliminarily. The team attended a web-authoring course on Wednesday afternoon. Friday's crits gave the team more of an idea about the level of presentation required. The previous
years project websites were made available to us on Friday. This gave us
a better idea what was involved as our project was expected to go beyond
what had been done before.
Week 3The team met up on Monday to agree what to do that week. We presented a range of general ideas to our supervisor, and the best option was agreed upon as being the actual implementation of an RF sensor related to air quality. It was left to us to provide a survey of air quality sensors, and to choose our best option amongst these. We hoped to demonstrate a working system by the end of the project.Wednesday afternoon saw the first field trip. We made contact with Jae-Min Kim on Thursday, Min is involved in experimentation with the e-box, and RF sensors, and will hopefully provide us with assistance in setting up our system in the future. Our first crit
was on Friday. The team made a real effort to present well the features
of our project to our target audience. While our presentation attracted
little criticism, it was agreed that we had presented background but very
little substance on what progress we were making.
Week 4We spent all day Monday discussing our situation, having agreed to monitor PM10s in indoor air. We made precious little progress as PM10 sensors were generally large and expensive - not suitable for RF applications. The group ended our meeting with no clear idea of our goals for the week. Background reading revealed that we had made a fundamental error in attempting to monitor indoor particulates. While particulates are important to indoor air quality, they are generally associated with smoking - the most dangerous gasses in indoor air quality are Radon and CO.We found a few websites for CO sensors on Tuesday, and agreed to concentrate on typing up our background information to reflect our work for the rest of the day. Week 5Feedback from our group crit this week pointed us back in the direction of monitoring PM10s. While smoking does cause particulates, another type of particulate pollution is mould spores and dust mites. We realised that we could monitor these kinds of PM10s through the use of proxy indicators - temperature and relative humidity.We agreed to investigate the problems caused by mould further, and to research humidity sensors as well as our CO sensor we decided upon. Temperature sensors are already available within the department. We met with Jae-Min Kim to discuss the software involved in providing the service, and the format for a demonstration system at the end of the project. Week 6As we had looked at alternatives to a CO sensor last week, the group debated whether to provide a suite of related e-Services encompassing health, safety, energy efficiency, and information.To support this idea, we discussed a service monitoring occupancy times and altering heating times within the home to suit. This would require both sophisticated temperature sensing, and actuators to switch heating on or off at given times. Week 7This week saw an intense effort to finalise our assessment of the availability of CO sensors, and to procure some for use in our project. Prices ranged from 12 pounds to 50 pounds, although some cheaper sensors were ill-suited to use in our project. Eventually we settled on sensors made by a company called Sixth-Sense, as they had an excellent specification that was suited to our purpose.Our presentation was rescheduled to next week as time was short during the crit. Week 8We met David Shearer from Scottish Power this week, to discuss our ideas on providing an energy saving service that changed heating times in the home. We knew that Scottish Power provided 'weathercall', a programme where heating times in the home are modified according to weather forecasts. This is operated over national radio frequencies.We were also made aware of CELECT, a programme that provided a similar service to our intended e-Service. It also provided home-automation services far beyond what we had proposed. Week 9Following our findings about CELECT, and given the complexity of developing an e-Service for automating heating times, we decided to drop this e-Service in favour of developing our other services more fully.We wrote up much of our background on CO and Humidity this week. We also wrote up our findings on the other forms of air pollution, and our justification for neglecting them in favour of the ones we chose. We also made a small demonstration house model within which we could situate our sensors. Week 10The group had concerns this week regarding the feasibility of a demonstration. Although we had our solution mostly in place, we were still without an actual sensor, or the means to alter CO levels for demonstration purposes.It was decided that we would make a small circuit to simulate what a sensor would do, and feed the signal into our example e-Box. We gave a presentation approximating to our final one this week. The feedback suggested that the focus of our presentation should change slightly. Week 11We went over our model of the e-Service to check it for consistency. We also made our adjustments to our presentation slides, and continued to write up the website.Week 12This week consisted of finalising our slides and rehearsing our presentation.We also made the last few rehearsals of our demonstration.
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