Smart Energy Saver

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  The prototype of a room (Mojo Dojo Casa House) with our product!

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  The LDR doing it's work!

Inspiration

Our inspiration is the Singapore Green Plan 2030. The Green Plan is to help build a sustainable future, as engineers of the future, we need to help to achieve the plan by contributing to it. We plan on helping everyone build towards this common goal by creating this product that will save energy. This product helps people track their daily energy usage, so that people are more aware of their energy consumption.

What it does

The light sensor (LDR) and ultrasonic sensor in the device can be used in workplaces and at homes to track which parts of the office is the brightest and most used. The light bulb is turns on when the room is dark and energy used in tracked. The ultrasonic sensor will display how popular a location is based on the number of people who enter the room. The data can tell companies which parts of the office they can dim or switch off the lights since it is less used to save energy. The display for both scenarios can show the energy consumption for the areas and thus help better track energy usage.

How we built it

Hardware: The project used ambient light sensors (LDR) to measure natural light, ultrasonic sensors to detect human presence, and smart switches to control lighting. These sensors were interfaced with a microcontroller board using Arduino, which acted as the brain of the system.

Software: The software was developed to integrate the data from sensors and control the lighting system accordingly. Algorithms were implemented to determine when to adjust lighting levels based on ambient light and human presence. Real-time energy monitoring was achieved by connecting the system to a smart energy meter.

User Interface: A user-friendly interface screen dashboard was designed to allow users to check energy usage limits and monitor real-time energy consumption as well as the number of people who walk in the room.

Challenges we ran into

Incorrect lighting such as the LED being placed too close to the LDR caused the LDR's signal to assume that the room is bright when the LED was turned on. This caused the LED to blink every 1 second instead of being switched on when the room was dark.

Due to the complexity of the fusion of the microcontroller as well as the hardware, we had spent a lot of time debugging the code to achieve it's final outcome.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are especially proud of our hard work in creating a user friendly product that can reduce energy consumption through data collected from the LDR and ultrasonic sensor. Finally debugging the program would a huge accomplishment we were elated to achieve as we spent the whole day ensuring it was working and there were not any hidden bugs.

What we learned

We learnt the importance of teamwork, patience and resilience. During Day 1, we had to learn how to work as a team as we had different ideas. Once we overcame that, we had to be patience as we overcame a lot of bugs in the program. Furthermore, there were times where we felt like giving up as it was challenging and we thought it was beyond our experience. Despite that we persevered and continued pushing through.

What's next for Smart Energy Saver

Constantly update our product with the newest technology to ensure it is up to date and not outdated so that users can use our product seamlessly. We could also introduce data analytics to allow users to improve their energy consumptions with areas that are higher than others. We could also find a more efficient way to create this so that it can be mass produced for more people to use.

Built With

• arduino