This project is a work in progress.I’m pretty close to being done with phase 1.
The Project:
(The need for knowledge.)
From practical experience, I know that the temperature closer to the heated structure is warmer than further away. But how does it diminish? Is there an immediate drop or more of a gradual change. Is it warmer away from walls or not? How much to doors help in an unheated space? My practical experience comes from the observation that drinks stored in my garage close to the house do not generally freeze in the winter. Further out, not so.
Why do I care? Energy use is a massive, life critical function.Take away energy and what do you have? Heat, cooking, transportation. How would you life be different without those. Would you manually cut down trees and turn them into planks to make your house? (using hand crafted rocks because there is no energy to make the steel for your axe) A microscopic change in the pattern of energy usage has broad reaching impact ind is worth billions of dollars.
This project is actually a reincarnation of a project I built about 10 years ago. I’ve even reused the temperature sensors from that project. What has changed is the way the temperature is read (I used a Serial port A/D Converter before and a VB program to read and post the data). No wireless transmission of the data, no JSON posting,. I did previously have charting where I could set the duration of the charts, which sensors to draw etc.
Project Details
This project is a multi-dimensional project… and Internet of Things project where the things are temperature sensors placed in strategic locations to measure the gradient temperatures both inside and outside an unheated garage.
- Arduino for reading the sensors.
- Zigbee for transmitting the data to a Laptop.
- Node.JS for reading the transmitted data, reformatting the data and submitting it to a web-based database
- PHP for processing the incoming JSON packet of sensor data and inserting the data into
- MySQL database for recording the data
- PHP/HTML/Charting library for displaying the recorded data
- Appcelerator for loading the webpage within a mobile APP
- Appcelerator for another mobile APP to consume the Database Data using a JSON feed.
Knowledge gained
The knowledge gained at this stage was only from my previous project. (This one is not yet sending real data to the web).
The previous project worked, but soon after implementing it, I moved. I did a gradient on that project but vertically and inside the house.
In Room Temperature Gradient
I learned there was a several degree difference between the floor and ceiling of a room. So keep your kids out of the bunk bed top in the summer and visa versa. More seriously, if you want to open your windows in the summer, open the top window down, not the bottom one up.
The AM Temperature dip.
I’ve never read about this before, but reliably, I saw a few degree sudden dip in temperature right around sunrise. I’ll be looking to validate this observation and writing about it in the future. I’m sure meterologists know about this and it may be related to morning dew, but I independently observed it.