1. Elizabeth Liner
Lab of Things

2. 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

3. 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?

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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 .
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

8. 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 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

9. 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

10. 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)

11. Questions?