weatherbox:project_peacock:start [Smart Campus Energy Lab Wiki]

This is an old revision of the document!

We are Justin and Allyson. As a team of high school interns, we strive to perform our best at finding prime renewable energy.

Work in UH research lab (SCEL)

   – Learn about energy and sustainability
   – Learn about hardware, software, communications, & sensor networks
   – Work in teams
   – Work on oral and written communication skills
   – Have fun and get to know other interns, mentors, faculty

Monday - 6/20/16

We went over the safety checklist for the lab. We opened and tested the Belkin WeMo Insight Smart Plug. We spent two hours trying to set it up due to poor instructions provided. It was a good source of renewable energy but we realized that it would not last that long due to the wearing down of the metal clicker. We set a goal to build a simple version of the smart plug (excluding the ability to connect to a phone app).

Tuesday - 6/21/16

We were introduced to circuits and the bread/proto boards. We learned the units for voltage, current, and resistance, as well as Ohms law, the voltage divider, and the power formula. We practiced solving for power, voltage, current, and resistance in series circuits.

Wednesday - 6/22/16

We listened to Dr. Anthony Kuh's lecture about Hawaii's current energy situation as well as future plans such as the smart grid. After the lecture, we were given three drawings of parallel circuits to build and solve for resistance, current, power, and voltage. We were also introduced to solar panels.

Thursday - 6/23/16

We continued learning about solar panels by going outside and measuring the voltage and current of different sources connected to the solar panel. The different sources we measured with were full batteries, empty batteries, short circuits, open circuits, and fans. After gathering our data, we solved for the power generated and saw how the maximum power was not being used. Dr. Anthony Kuh also talked to us about the inefficiency of solar panels in comparison to fossil fuels.

Friday - 6/24/16

We learned about the Arduino and how to program it. First, we navigated the Arduino programming Integrated Development Environment (IDE). After, we were able to program the Arduino to blink and measure the voltage given.

Monday - 6/27/16

Our lab day began with an overview on coding using C++ on an Arduino program. Then we ate lunch and had a delicious taste of Andrew's Tim Tams and UH Manoa's food court meals. After that, we went back to a little more complicated coding and created circuits of our own as well as programming them. Then we were presented a current sensor that we were needed to program and make it perform the function to measure voltage, current and power. However, this took us 2 hours to do but this is an important part of our own project.

Tuesday - 6/28/16

We created stoplights using arduino and programming skillz. Then we programmed two stoplights to show, and finally a stoplight with a blinking crosswalk. We also worked with lcd display boards and played around with the program to see how it works. Then, we tried to use it in joint with the current sensor, in which we accidentally fried after misplaced wires. However, after soldering a new one, we managed to get it to work.

Wednesday - 6/29/16

We built a circuit with PCB Power Relay G6Ms. With these power relays we were able to turn on and off an led. After we finished working with the led, we began learning how to program xbees.Took us the whole day to solve the problem though.

Thursday - 6/30/16

During regular session today, we did our first mock presentation. In the lab, we gave tours to middle school visitors. During the tour, Dr. Kuh introduced us to signal processing and machine learning. After we watched video and listened to his mini lecture, we continued to set up and program xbees. We were finally able to finish programming the xbees and send messages wirelessly.

Friday - 7/1/16

We continued to program the xbees and wirelessly send messages. Today, we took it a step further and tried to program the xbees to work with arduinos instead of computers. We struggled throughout the day and we were unable to do it without the help of Andrew. However, we all could not get the xbees to work with two arduinos.

Tuesday - 7/5/16

Today Dr. Kuh also came into the lab to give us a brief overview on machine learning. We also continued to try programming the xbees and arduinos to wirelessly send messages. Andrew gave us hints on how to get our arduino program to work. His hints were: rx.getData(0) and rx.getDataLength(). We were unable to get the arduino and xbees to work.

Thursday - 7/7/16

Introduction

Goals

Meeting Minutes

Meeting Logs

Smart Campus Energy Lab Wiki