Project Log: William Wright

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We finalised the topic 'energy services via the internet' this week. As my background is in software and telecommunications I feel particularly suited to this project. I tried to help my team members get up to speed on internet technology as none of them had done anything to do with computers before.

Week 2

We split up the background reading so that each team member could cover an area of their own in more detail. We covered e-Services, broadband and the internet, wireless technologies, and smart homes.
Based on these we thought up a number of our own proposals for the detail of the project. We got to see the details of last year's projects for the first time on Friday, which covered a lot of the same things we had done during the week. 

Week 3

We presented our range of ideas to our supervisor on Monday, and after some discussion we picked our specific e-service. It was important that our project contained a quantitative aspect, and relevance to society.

Our decision is to provide an air quality monitoring service, not only as a proposal, but also to look into the aspects of implementing that service.

I also met Jae-Min for the first time this week. Min is involved in experiments with the Ericsson e-Box and Java 2 Enterprise Edition as part of the smarthomes project.
We presented a very general crit explaining the concepts involved, and received some criticism because of this.

Week 4

We discussed air quality sensors at length this week, as we wanted to provide a service useful to society at large. Therefore, we researched what the major air quality pollutants were, both indoors and outdoors.
At first glance the choices of sensors were difficult. The sensors for the most threatening types of pollutants are too expensive for use in the home. Nevertheless we typed up our findings to include in our report.
I provided a small demonstration Java applet that wrote a graph dynamically, to prove the concept to our team. I also got hold of the J2EE software, and some of the departments' previous code.

Week 5

This week, through feedback from the crits, we found that we could monitor at least one kind of pm10 air pollution: dustmites and mould spores. This can be done quite cheaply, using sensors readily and cheaply available: temperature and humidity.
As the major service however we chose Carbon Monoxide monitoring. This is a straightforward service with practical benefit to society and stands up well as our main service.
We resolved to do reading on CO and Mould, and to think about the services we would provide.
I confirmed that everything from last year's project worked on my home PC, so that I could code the new webpages we proposed.

Week 6

We explored options in providing a suite of energy services this week. 

I proposed a new service monitoring occupancy times. We could then change heating times within the home for the most efficiency. It would be difficult to implement this within the timescale of the project, so it would remain a proposal at best. However, this service would complete our suite of safety, health and reducing energy consumption.

Week 7

As it was getting late in the project, we needed to finalise our choice of CO sensor. Despite having done a few surveys earlier, we wanted to look at as many sensors as possible. 
Everybody trawled the net independently for information on Carbon Monoxide sensors.
We settled on the best choice for our project and proceded to start negotiations to get hold of one.

Week 8

Having proposed our service altering heating times according to occupancy times, I met with David Shearer of Scottish Power in order to discuss the feasibility of our service. Scottish Power provide 'weathercall' a programme where heating times in the home are modified according to weather forecasts. Eventually I saw that our service didn't go far enough beyond Scottish Power's to justify our developing it.

Week 9

We wrote up our justifications for providing our particular services this week, and also justified not providing services for the alternatives.
I started producing mock-up webpages that reflected our idea of the service. I chose to go with a Java applet rather than a servlet, as our demonstration system would not suffer from long download times. In the real world it would be more efficient to use a servlet.

Week 10

We were still without a sensor, so this week we spoke to Min about creating a small circuit to simulate how a sensor would behave, without actually having one. Vasillis agreed to provide the 'sensor simulator'.
I finalised the webpages we were to demonstrate at the end of the project. Although the CO sensor will be live, the humidity graph will not be demonstrated, in order to keep the demonstration simpler.

Week 11

This week was mostly involved with finalising and rearranging our project slides after last week's crit. There were some traumas due to differing versions of powerpoint on different machines.
Our group decided to change the format of the webpages to be similar to the format of our presentation slides. I used a template to ensure our webpages were all in the new format, and continued to write material for them.

Week 12

During this week Min and I went through the procedures to follow in demonstrating the technology. Not least amongst this was getting the networking working with the laptop. We soon had my webpages fully integrated with the hardware and the system working.