Elizabeth Liner Lab of Things

Lab of Things What does it do? How does it work? A portal to collect information, which gets sent to Windows Azure How does it work? Connects with sensors that are set up with the portal, receives data, sends the data to Windows Azure. What it works with Phillips Hue Lights Z-wave sensors .Net Gadgeteer Kinect

Problem Statement What can Lab of Things do? What can be used in the future? Can we create a basic mobile app to do something interesting?

The Idea A mobile application that works as an energy saver Goals Keeps power used low Has a set of rules of how many devices can be on at once, or how long devices can be on without being used Goals Work with Lab of Things to receive data (and in turn learn about it) Create a mobile application that interacts with the data in a cool way Create a mobile application that creates some kind of automatic system for a user’s power management

Implementation (February) Downloaded and installed Lab of Things Everything seemed to work okay Attempted to set up environment Contacted Lab of Things support for correct Z-wave Driver Learned that I was following the wrong documentation Researched Hue, Android and Azure thinking that everything was going really well with Lab of Things

Implementation (early – mid March) Received all of my parts, and started testing the interaction with Lab of Things Hue Lights Followed user guide (Hue), everything set up well and I was able to control these with JSON call through my internet browser Z-wave Nothing connected to Lab of Things, and there was no documentation I contacted the Lab of Things support, and the Z-wave support. Z-wave had no idea what was talking about, so I waited for Lab of Things

Implementation (mid March – April) Heard back from Lab of Things support Added Z-wave to project correctly And, there was an additional file that he sent to me via email. First time I was concerned about the code, and realized just how Beta it was. 3/18: finally able to setup the sensors and begin receiving data Android application Modified an existing Hue example application that worked perfectly

Implementation (1st – 3rd week of April) Set up Windows Azure Attempted to connect to Lab of Things, but I was getting exceptions Went back to Lab of Things Downloaded new Source Code (Beta 3) But, it didn’t include an updated Z-wave driver, so I had to email the Lab of Things support again. I received a reply a couple days later and it looked like everything was great Back to Azure Attempted connecting, and it crashed Rebuilt again and again, and it crashed Even tried downgrading to Beta 2, but it’s not easy to and there’s no documentation

Final Implementation Status and Demo! Devices data to Lab of Things works about half the time Lab of Things to Azure never worked for me Azure to mobile was never set up (because there was no data to send) Mobile to Lights works great every time

Thoughts and Recommendations Lab of Things There are so many moving parts, it’s incredibly difficult to get working Z-wave and Hue Z-wave problems were because of Lab of Things, but Hue worked perfectly If there was a better way to connect them, this would have been a much smoother project Future Improvements Look into other ways to connect the input (sensor) and output (lights) Add in a language of rules .NET Gadgeteer (audio functionality)

Questions?