AutoVent

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  AutoVent

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  Monitor OLED

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  Webpage

Inspiration

The main inspiration was from one of my class taught by Dr. Bing Chen. In his Renewable energy class we talked about sustainable houses. In this class he was mentioning needs of more IoT devices which will support the resident. This lead me to my automatic venting system. I also wanted to work on a hardware project to be able to compete with the competitor that has more software knowledge.

What it does

This device will monitor the Room Temperature and Outside Temperature compare with the desired temperature and open or close the vent to adjust the Room Temperature. This project also has a website which you will be able to see the current state of the house.

How I built it

For the House model I used a 3d printer and to read the temperature I used two BME280 sensor interfacing with I2C. ESP32 was used to control the temperature sensor and the servo motor which was controlling the vent and sending the read data to Thingspeak (MQTT server broker). The website was made using html5, CSS, and Node.js

Challenges I ran into

The biggest challenge I had was designing the heater to increase the temperature in the model house. First I used a Dew resistor heater (multiple resistor in parallel). Then I ran into the issue of not being able to control the heater in the speed I was needing for the project. The first method took too much time to heat up. I used a lot of time looking for alternative methods. Overall, I decided to short a IC manually controlled.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

At the previous hackathon I competed, I was mainly working on the embedded system side and the server. My other team mate worked on the web app page. This time I was not able to learn as much about web development so I worked on making a simple website and displaying data read from the sensors through a MQTT server. This was the most proud part of the project I completed.

What I learned

I learned lot more about web design comparing to before the hackathon. What I also learned was to manage time more strictly in a time limited project.

What's next for AutoVent

Due to the time limitation I was only able to make the website functional. I will update the design and functionality of the website. The structure design needed lot more time. I designed the 3d model to print it using a 3d printer. But also due to time limitation I was not able to design the 3d model which would have the best potential to demonstrate this concept. Other sensor like the VOX sensor could be added.

Built With

• arduino
• bme280
• esp32
• node.js
• thingspeak