Sunlight and Temperature Study at Berry College
A video can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/Lwayre-ZFYE
(Below): The enclosure design used to house multiple sensors used to gather sunlight, temperature, and WiFi values
The Sunlight and Temperature Study conducted by a group of three Creative Technologies students is an initiative that seeks to measure the amount of lux (light), temperature, and RSSI (WiFi) on a building situated in a college campus. The group of students, recognized by their pseudonym, Callisto, was deployed to study these values on Hermann Hall, the office of financial and other governing sources of Berry College's on-going operation.
(Below): Trello board
The Callisto Trello board, which was used to keep track of the progress of the Sunlight and Temperature Study, encouraging and allowing all three members to see what needs to be completed and by what specific deadline. Upon completing the objectives, "cards" were marked as complete and labeled by the member(s) who did.
(Below): A Figma diagram
Pictured is one interface of the Figma diagram used to envision and detail a basic layout of what an ideal website that reviews over the Sunlight and Temperature Study would be. This is one out of six interfaces that supported us in developing our accessible, large-scale website.
(Below): A state diagram
You are now viewing a state diagram constructed using draw.io, an internet platform used to design navigation through interfaces of a website. This, similar to Figma, allowed us to view what we hoped the flow would be through our study's website page, which begins with the index.php page and allows users to maneuver through every other page and back to previous ones.
(Below): (Please disregard the values) Our breadboard with all sensors
Pictured above is one of our four breadboards, which does all the rough tracking work of the project, collecting values based off environmental conditions at fifteen-minute intervals. One can see the long, large ESP32 sensor, which does the WiFi tracking; the BH1750 sensor, the small, blue sensor used to collect amounts of light; the temperature sensor is last, which is the three-prong black-tip sensor sticking upwards.
(Below): A Fusion360 rendering of our study enclosure
A Fusion360 rendering of our Sunlight and Temperature Study enclosure can be seen above. Prior to deploying our sensors, this was one of the on-sight environmental images produced to help envision the placement.
(Below): Another Fusion360 rendering
To give our study some personality, we designed a Fusion360 rendering in a secluded, obscene environment.
(Below): An aerial view of Hermann Hall
Above you can see Hermann Hall, the building we conducted and gathered our values of sunlight, temperature, and WiFi on.
Key:
1. West Sensor
2. North Sensor
3. East Sensor
4. South Sensor
(Below): Results on data visualization graphs, showing lux and temp over time
The results from Callisto's Sunlight and Temperature Study can be found above. Sporadic lags in data collection can be seen, such as with November 10th to the 13th on the South Sensor graph, where both lux and temperature drop down to substantially low levels, due to no battery life and not being swapped out over the course of two days. Dead batteries created the biggest challenge of the study, where batteries used were 3.7volt, making it necessary to swap them out every other day for consistent readings. Acquiring similar size batteries with higher power would be ideal as well. Overall, the study was valuable to identifying when sunlight hit and left the buildings with some scattered temperature values and precise WiFi signals that were half efficient and half lagging.
