Sensors Everywhere

Cellphones and laptops, plus Arduinos mean there are "Sensors Everywhere" More information can be found at the project website.

There are a million applications. Let's use these sensors to track energy consumption!

We are seeking to: --Make an image of stray electric fields (like those measured by a Home Depot live-wire detector) overlaid on a photo of the space. This will generate ideas on designing a wearable sensor that can detect whether a light or computer is on or off.

--Automatically generate a "timeline" of an individual's energy-using activities within the space, for instance: Turned on light and fan, ran laser cutter for x minutes, used y watts, turned off light and went away (Do the timeline using the simplest set of mobile sensors/mobile phones possible.)

--Generate a ton of real-world data for U of L students/faculty (and anyone else) to apply visualization and machine learning algorithms.

There is lots of overlap with the Quantified Self group. If the above goals don't fit your exact interests but you want to join up and work on sensors in general, that is great.

Things that would be helpful along the way are --Borrow a good EMF detector and spectrum analyzer to figure out what to look for in the e-field when a user flips a switch (DONE, we have one to bring to the space as of mid Sept)

--More spatial data collection, build a datalogger shield for your Arduino and carry around some sensors (temperature, lighting and electric fields, and whatever else would help infer what you are doing) (Somewhat DONE, I built the super simple emf detector by Alai)

--Someone with an iPhone to try out the "Batphone" app to locate a user within the space (DONE, I have this running on an ipod touch. It is pretty interesting)

--User interface expert: we could use a minimally annoying mobile- phone based survey to ask what the user is doing when the sensors detect something new

--More Kill-A-Watt power monitors, or even build some Tweet-A-Watts and code to gather true energy consumption data for judging the accuracy of the timeline.

--A 3D model of the LVL1 space --for instance the Counterstrike game level exported into some common format!

--Make sensors small and glove-wearable