Abstract
The article describes the design phase, development and practical application of a smart object integrated in a desk lamp and called “Smart Lamp”, useful to optimize the indoor thermal comfort and energy savings that are two important workplace issues where the comfort of the workers and the consumption of the building strongly affect the economic balance of a company. The Smart Lamp was built using a microcontroller, an integrated temperature and relative humidity sensor, some other modules and a 3D printer. This smart device is similar to the desk lamps that are usually found in offices but it allows one to adjust the indoor thermal comfort, by interacting directly with the air conditioner. After the construction phase, the Smart Lamp was installed in an office normally occupied by four workers to evaluate the indoor thermal comfort and the cooling consumption in summer. The results showed how the application of the Smart Lamp effectively reduced the energy consumption, optimizing the thermal comfort. The use of DIY approach combined with read-write functionality of websites, blog and social platforms, also allowed to customize, improve, share, reproduce and interconnect technologies so that anybody could use them in any occupied environment.
Highlights
Over the past years several shared projects and low-cost alternative technologies have appeared and developed, bringing end users closer to electronics in a simple and fast way [1,2,3]
Through the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approach, the user becomes the maker of these technologies, removing structural, technological and economical obstacles [4]. The spread of this movement has led to the proliferation of devices always connected to a communicating-actuating network, i.e., a web of objects connected to the network and interconnected to each other, named Internet of Things (IoT) [5] starting a technological revolution
And 17 July 2015 with automatic control provided by the Smart Lamp
Summary
Over the past years several shared projects and low-cost alternative technologies have appeared and developed, bringing end users closer to electronics in a simple and fast way [1,2,3]. This device, called Smart Lamp, allows the indoor thermal comfort to be controlled and optimized, through direct interaction with the Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC). The open source approach has an enormous impact on current technology and has changed the way in which many tech companies do business and our society [28,29,30] Following this path, the new smart device presented below was implemented in order to prevent low occupant satisfaction and high energy costs, demonstrating how these new technologies can be integrated in the real built environment and improve the well-being of end users. It is a way to make accessible and check how this device allows to optimize the thermal comfort and the energy consumption, evolving over time relying on end-users’ participation
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