Sophisticated 1:4 Scale Internet of Things Model Home for K-12 STEM Outreach

Abstract

LANA Advanced Systems a multidisciplinary Capstone Project team, has designed and built a quarter scale model home and embedded system interface board to connect control modules to enable K-12 students to interact with a high quality educational manipulative to foster interest in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) topics. The interface board has been designed to be able to support future modules. This quarter scale model home, known henceforth as HANS (Home Automated Networking System), is four feet wide, eight feet long, three feet high, and has a roof with a one foot peak. The roof is split evenly between an asphalt shingle analog and a corrugated metal analog that one would find on a real home. HANS is equipped with six different sensors in each room; these sensors are ambient light, ambient temperature, relative humidity, pressure, moisture level, and motion detection. All sensor data is processed through an intelligence board, The Texas Instruments CC3200, to a cloud platform, Cayenne, and is displayed for user interaction. HANS is also equipped with control modules. These control modules include servo motors for automatic window shades, a front door lock, zone control air vents, and motion flags. HANS is also equipped with five cameras located around the model home. One in each room that displays a live view of the control modules, and one outside that shows the heat lamp simulators and the exterior of the house. The purpose of HANS is to be an educational manipulative for STEM outreach in primarily K-12 education. Teachers from around Texas will come to Texas A&M to learn more about STEM topics, and HANS will help facilitate this learning. When these teachers return to their schools with this new knowledge, they will also be able to access HANS to run experiments remotely with students. This can be accomplished through Cayenne, a cloud based service , and the WyzeCam smartphone application which displays live and recorded video feeds from the house . Over the course of 10 months, LANA Advanced Systems has designed and built HANS. The design process included electrical design as well as mechanical, structural, and software design. Introduction/Background The Home Automated Networking System (HANS) is an educational manipulative for the purpose of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) outreach and applied research into the field of Internet of Things (IoT). Because STEM outreach enables interested students to experience unique learning potentials, The Texas A&M University Engineering Technology and Industrial Distribution (ETID) department requires a model home for their summer STEM education program. This program brings educators from around the state to Texas A&M to give them tools to excite young minds about learning about STEM. Internet of Things describes the integration of intelligent devices into our everyday life; IoT enables these devices to send and receive data to the internet, usually via a cloud based platform. IoT is used in a variety of applications in everyday life; these applications include but are not limited to: health and welfare, safety and security, energy and cost management, and home automation and convenience. An example of health and welfare is a heart monitor that is connected to an application on a smartphone. Safety and security typically consists of smart cameras located at entry points outside a house that will notify the homeowner if it sees motion activity. An example of energy and cost management is a smart Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning (HVAC) unit that can be updated via an application on a smartphone. The category of home automation and convenience would include smart window blinds that react to lighting from inside and outside the home. For HANS specifically, we are focusing on home automation and convenience. This will take the form of smart blinds, lights, door locks, zone controlling HVAC vents, and a motion flag to simulate human activity[1]. Description of Project The Electronic Systems Engineering Technology (ESET) Department at Texas A&M University has continuously enhanced its curriculum into a learning experience that culminates with the completion of a two-semester Capstone project. This ever evolving program now includes more laboratory experience than ever and over half of the courses involve major projects that utilize real industry sponsors along with real industry projects. These hands-on learning environments lead to a type of experiential learning that is unrivaled by other more theory centric programs. By the time that an ESET student graduates, he or she will have pursued, managed, and delivered a real life industry project. The sponsors for these projects vary from smaller local companies to the Department of Defense and the United States Air Force to NASA[2]. This rigorous culmination experience provides a crucible through which aspiring engineers grow and develop into industry-ready professionals. Capstone projects expose developing engineers to experiences in other aspects of industry such as project management, project planning, budgeting, and marketing. These useful life skills give TAMU ESET students a beneficial competitive edge in industry with marketable skills and experience defining and solving unique engineering challenges. With this context in mind, LANA is creating a scaled model home for the purposes of STEM outreach and applied research in the field of smart home technology. The model home will function as a tool for educators to use in order to ignite a passion in the hearts of their students for engineering and technology. This will be focussed on the fields of additive manufacturing, smart network connectivity, and energy management technology. The Home Automated Networking System (HANS) provides a solution for this need for a model smart home with functionality using Internet of Things. Internet of Things refers to a collection of devices connected through a network. These devices can be a multitude of different things to include computing devices, sensors, and physical objects such as actuators or relays. There are four main areas that make up IoT: home automation and convenience, energy cost and management, health and wellness, and safety and security. This understanding of IoT is one topic that four researchers from Texas A&M University are trying to teach. Those four researchers from the Engineering Technology and Industrial Distribution (ETID) Department at Texas A&M University were award a National Science Foundation grant to promote interest in STEM careers in classrooms across Texas. The ETID department will be utilizing HANS primarily as a teaching tool to promote interest in STEM careers with a long-term objective towards remote outreach. HANS will be used in STEM education by showing teachers different lab experiments and teaching them how they work. These experiments will all be relevant to the fields of smart technology and IoT connectivity as they can be applied in a home[3]. For the scope of this project, this technology is applied to a number of control and sensor parameters within the functionality of the house. HANS has fifteen functional requirements and performance specifications. These range from the physical measurements of the model to the sensor requirements to the internet connectivity protocols. HANS has the ability to control internal temperature, light levels, and a number of other physical systems such as door locks and window blinds. Along with these functionalities, the system has the ability to sense ambient temperature, internal temperature, internal lighting levels, ambient light, humidity, water levels, and motion. All of these sensors are connected to a local network through a custom designed intelligence board. This multi-functional intelligence board, paired with a TI CC3200 Launchpad will provide the monitoring and control of the system. These aspects will be covered in more detail in this paper.