Heat-o-meter

Real-Time Heating System data at your fingertips

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Inspiration

We have seen that there are quite some students who live in the private accommodation where they would be charged for the heating and electricity usage, and often international students are not fully aware of the usage statistics of their electricity and heating systems. Therefore, we thought of working on a solution to tackle this in such a way that it not only provides data to monitor and be aware of the utilization, but also enables the individuals to reduce the consumption and become more sustainable in the end.

What it does

Heat-o-meter is a wireless device which is connected to the heater just like an attachment, replacing the conventional heater control knob. This device can control as well as monitor the utilization of the heater and gives the user a visual feedback via a web-app to indicate where it could have been optimized in order to be more sustainable and save money at the same time.

How we built it

We're planning to build it in the form of a web interface which integrates the data received from the hardware device(Heat-o-meter). Raspberry Pi acts as a data Node that is publishing data to a remote database, which is then used by the user with respective login credentials to view and monitor the changes of heating system in Real-Time. There is even a window open detection mechanism, which helps in automatically shutting off the heating system once it detects that the window is open.

Challenges we ran into

Since, we work on the data which is not present at the moment, we had to generate past data using randomizer. Also, it's quite less time to think as well as implement everything from scratch.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In the end, we managed to build our entire infrastructure from scratch and created the proof of concept which seems quite interesting given the time. And we're quite positive about it.

What we learned

We realized that setting up infrastructure is quite a challenging task under strict timeline and it often consumes most of the time that we could have spent on the actual business logic.

What's next for Heat-o-meter

We will have to enrich and expand our User Interface and create a 3D printed housing to fit our hardware inside the casing which can be mounted on the Heater with ease.

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