This is an archive site. Current senoir design projects are at https://projects.eng.uci.edu.
* Team Name: Connected Energy Control
* Team Members:
William Lin Wei (EE)
Victor Choi (EE)
Shuma Edwin Le (CSE)
Eric Cho (CSE)
* Team Mentor: Prof. G.P. Li (CalPlug/Calit2) & Dr. Michael Klopfer (CalPlug/Calit2)
* Objective :
This goal of the project is to develop an intelligent system for reliable and responsive power management using connected sensors and devices. This project serves as a demonstration of this novel approach to device control. Although this project will focus on a residential setting to demonstrate this capability, it can be generalized to a much larger scale. The system will contain a network of devices to share information of each other, including device state, sensor input and power consumption. Using this shared data, each device will have extended “spatial-awareness” and be better able to detect and predict user engagement. This project demonstrates a system that combines network and sensor data, which may be implemented with many types of consumer electronic devices. The devices will intelligently change power states based on information gathered from internal sensors and external sources (nearby sensors). Intelligence can be implemented in a centralized fashion (i.e. in the “cloud”) or at the device itself (i.e. “edge” intelligence), or a hybrid of these approaches.
* Design Concept :
For our demonstration, the following sub-system components are considered:
A network of interconnected devices, A set of devices will be connected to a MQTT broker through different types of network connection including Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and ZigBee. Devices will be able to exchange information about themselves(state and operation) and share sensor-related data.
Intelligent Energy Control, each device can make the decision entirely by itself without user input. It can collect sensor input and other information from itself and the subscribed MQTT topics to make an accurate prediction and thus actuate the hardware. System intelligence can also be implemented on the broker itself, allowing artificial intelligence and machine learning to be deployed to the system.
Control Application, a control panel to manage the system-wide operation and thresholds to provide users control of energy management policies.
* Design Details :
Controller - The Espressif ESP8266 is the main micro-controller used in the demonstration project. It is a low cost, energy efficient micro-controller unit with an integrated Wi-Fi interface. The analog pin on the chip has 1024 levels of resolution and is easily multiplexed, it enables precise analog readings from sensors as required. It also has digital pins that support I2C, SPI, and UART communication protocols, makes it compatible with most of the sensors and actuators. In addition, the board can be programmed with Arduino IDE, which supports C, C++ and LUA. Its characteristics make it the ideal IoT board for energy saving purposes.
Sensors - The NodeMCU can be connected to a number of sensors including sensors for current/power, motion sensors, ambient light, time (RTC), sound, RF, etc. which provide environmental awareness for each device.
Network - Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is a lightweight TCP/IP protocol that uses a broker to relay messages between devices. Messages are typically outbound, thereby bypassing many firewall concerns in practical implementation. Amazon IoT services and Facebook Messenger use variations of MQTT for their respective services.
* Future Work :
We will be implementing other network systems to interconnect the devices, such as ZigBee or generic “packet” radio. We already have an AES-ECB-128 end-to-end encryption scheme developed. For control and management, we are developing a light-weight user interface to allow user control of tuning of operation parameters in addition to providing power usage information from the devices to the users.
* Team Poster : Click here to go our team poster