Sunlight Study
For my Intermediate Design Studio course, my group and I created a set of four light and temperature sensor modules to place on each side of the Moon Building at Berry College. We did this in an effort to answer three primary questions:
1. Is Moon's average outside temperature higher or lower than all other buildings on campus?
2. Is there a correlation between light levels and temperature?
3. Which side of the building is the hottest on average?
Before working on the hardware, we designated locations for our four sensors on the Moon Building. We chose these based on Wi-Fi strength. The first image shows the location of each sensors, and the second shows the vegetation and other secondary factors around the building.
Location of the four sensors on the Moon building.
Firstly, we began by constructing the breadboard prototype of our sensor based off of an EasyEDA schematic.
Next, we created a printed circuit board (PCB) based on the previous schematic.
After sending off the PCB to be manufactured, we soldered the different components into place. The electronics portion of our preparation was then complete. From there, we shifted our focus onto creating the enclosure our sensors would be housed in.
We then modeled our enclosure in Fusion360. This process involved printing, changing, and iterating on the design several times.
Renderings of the final enclosure design.
After 3D printing the enclosures, we added threaded heat inserts so that the top and bottom pieces could be screwed together.
After placing the PCBs into the enclosures, we then placed them in their designated locations on the Moon Building. After placing the sensors, we began focusing on developing our website.
We began by creating a state diagram detailing the flow of our site.
We then created mockups in Figma to show what we wanted our site to look like.
To complete our site, we returned to the three original questions we asked initially and created some data visualizations.
Finally, we laser cut a kiosk out of plywood to house the tablet that displays our website.
