MicroChallenge02

The Goal of the Week

After the first micro challenge we got talking about what ways we could push this opensource device further and how the chatbot aspect would work. As the idea of this challenge was to use a form of intelligence to create a physical output we had the first part figure out but the second part was a bit of a question for us. We brainstormed a bit and had various ideas what physical output could entail for our project. We thought about potentially create a daily report about ones use, or printing list of tips but in the end we thought about how we could raise awareness for the project and issues we are working on, but in the end landed on creating stickers that people can print and stick around their house.

The Process

In this week we had two main goals and decided to tackle both at the same time. We split our time between building out our NodeRed flow that we had started in week 1 , and starting to build and design the hardware that can be used to measure the energy in breaker boxes.

Understanding the Flow Of Information

To then transform the idea in our head to an actual working system we took some time to understand what each component might entail and next to this also go back and forth using chatgpt about what potential functions could be used using NodeRed and also through looking at the NodeRed flows we were able to better understand what already exists. Things like using a form of AI like Chatgpt to process information and send data back to storing our data in GoogleSheets were already nodes that existed and could work to make our jobs slightly easier in the end.'

Final Results

Dan Our Energy Friend

The way Dan works currently is that he takes a variety of inputs coming in through telegram and holds a conversation with the user. Next to this he is also constantly taking input from the plug and logging this into a google sheets. This database allows for him to get a better understanding of the users past behavior and give specific tips based on the persons personal usage. There are still a few bugs but that is for us to work out in the future. Below a video is shown in which you can see the interaction that one has with Dan.

Our Energy Measurer

At the moment we have a functioning energy monitor that we have built with easy to source components from a local electronics store. There is a slight issue with the calculation of the ampere and voltage of the measurements but this is most likely due to the type of wire we are trying to measure over. As a professor mentioned to us it is not possible to use current transformers over general appliance wires as they contain three different wires running through it not just one that you need. In turn this means our monitoring device can only be used as we designed in breaker boxes.

Reflecting on Micro challenge 02

This week led to a lot of progress within the research Oliver and I are currently conducting and also allowed us to experiment with more tools and ways to create the desired output. After the first challenge being a bit chaotic this time around I felt more secure in what we were doing and how to do it. I feel that it also reflects in the quality of work we were able to do in such a short timeframe.

We made even more progress in understanding our skills in coding and basic programming using tools like Node-Red, coding with Javascript and Arduino as well as understanding how to adapt existing state of the art technologies through different API calls. It was also nice this time around do a bit of hardware development, even if it was just a basic circuit to understand the real world aspects of our research, which was a welcome change to just working on software as we did in the previous micro challenge.

We can definitely feel ourselves adapting as designers, turning into hybrid designers from pure product designers we were before, this an exciting area for both of us as we've been able to explore a range of interests we've had that that we might otherwise not have been able to engage with as much in the past.

Moving forward we'd like to continue working on this energy monitor prototype, developing the circuit further to use a different microcontroller with an integrated ESP332 module, which would allow us to consolidate hardware into a much smaller package, as well as publish the received energy information to our Node-Red Dashboard and our friendly energybot Dan.

Building on this we'd like to create a custom PCB that integrates all the individual components we've used onto one board, and do a bit of old finished product design to create an appealing and usable casing that would facilitate an intuitive user experience and actually look like a consumer facing product.

We plan to develop a few prototypes that we could send to some volunteer Alpha testers, where we could then engage with our community through user led design feedback to better improve both Dan the energy bot and our energy monitor, to be able to investigate further our research idea of reducing consumption without lowering quality of life.