In the fall of 2008, I joined several faculty and students from my graduate program (Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts & Technology) on an exciting project. In collaboration with the University of Waterloo and Ryerson University, Simon Fraser has contributed to Team North‘s North House:
Team North will design and deliver North House, a compelling, marketable solar powered home that makes use of the latest in high-performance architecture and mobile communication technology, while building Canada’s next generation of leaders in sustainable engineering, business and design.
This October, after a two-year development cycle, our team traveled to Washington D.C. to compete in the US Department of Energy‘s Solar Decathlon on the Washington Mall:
The Solar Decathlon joins 20 college and university teams in a competition to design, build, and operate the most attractive and energy-efficient solar-powered house.
The architects and engineers on the project did an incredible job: combining leading-edge technology, modern aesthetics, and innovative materials to produce a net-zero solar powered home that is viable for the Canadian climate. After a challenging two-week competition, we placed 4th overall! Full results can be found on the Solar Decathlon scoring page. We were pleased with our performance, and feel proud of the achievement we’ve made with the house. Full details on the specifications and innovations of the house are available from the team website.
SFU’s contribution to this undertaking involved the development of a control system for the North House, and the design and creation of a suite of web-enabled applications to provide feedback, control, and community networking to the residents of the house. My role on the project was comprised of contributing to the design team for each of these main pieces of the interactive system, and then undertaking the development of each with a small team of programmers.
For the control system, I worked closely with Chris Brandson of VerTech Solutions. He wrote custom drivers for each of the house’s hardware systems (lighting, shades and blinds, HVAC, retractable bed, etc.) and configured them to communicate with Embedded Automation‘s mControl. I then developed a Ruby on Rails application to interface with mControl using SOAP. This allowed the design team to develop a custom interface for the residents of the home instead of relying on an off-the-shelf solution. The controls were then presented on three embedded touchscreens: a 17″ display mounted in the western end of the kitchen backsplash and two 8″ displays at the north and east entryways. The central panel provides digital controls for all of the house systems, while the entry panels provide local controls for nearby lights. Additionally, from each control point residents can put the house into user-configurable Presets such as Home, Away or Sleep. These presets represent configurations for various activities or times of day that can be activated with a single button press. The control and monitoring system we developed was noted as a standout by software developer Patrick Smith in his Survey of Home Monitoring & Control Systems at the Solar Decathlon.
I worked with closely with interaction designers Kevin Muise, Jenny Thai, and Jin Fan on the web application. These talented designers delivered high quality HTML, CSS, and image assets that I then incorporated into the Ruby on Rails application and populated with dynamic data and enabled with interactive behaviour. The house data was made available by Rob MacKenzie’s datalogging systems. Along with this contribution to the project, his invaluable talents at network administration, hardware procurement, and his knack for pulling off last-minute hacks can’t be overlooked!
Finally, Kevin Muise and I completed the Mobile application together. He led the development with nearly solo design and prototyping work. I then developed the final version based on his prototypes and integrated it with the Rails app and control system. The mobile application provides access to a subset of the features of the desktop web application, including graphing utilities, house controls, and community networking.
Interactive demonstrations of the web application and iPhone application can be found on the Team North website under Interface Demos. Also, I was lucky enough to be interviewed by David Gura from NPR for a brief segment about the iPhone application that aired on All Things Considered during the competition. The segment is available online.
The competition and project as a whole were intense and challenging. The difficulty of channeling the talents and perspectives of students and faculty from a range of disciplines across three universities and two timezones cannot be overestimated. Over the course of the year, I clumsily learned to speak the languages of architects, engineers, computer scientists, and project managers while participating in many teleconferences and email exchanges. I learned how important priorities can sometimes be missed when working in large geographically distributed teams because each person and team thinks someone else is doing it. And I learned a great deal about what not to do (…and less of what to do!) in software development. That being said, everyone on the project undertook their part with such enthusiasm and determination that we were able to overcome these obstacles and successfully deliver a house that is beautiful, powerful, and viable.
My sincere thanks to everyone on the team for their dedication and determination over the course of the project. It’s been a truly memorable experience. Also a huge congratulations to all the teams and great people that participated in the contest, especially those I met from Germany, California, Louisiana, and Cornell. In the coming year, I’ll be applying much of what I’ve learned on this project to my ongoing research into information visualization and tools for feedback on energy consumption.
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