UBC Undergraduate Research

LUZinda : a smart lighting system for the home Cramb, Megan; Marshall, Keara; Moreno, Sofia

Abstract

Tasked with designing a system to conserve energy in the home, a smart and autonomous lighting system known as LUZinda (luz is the Spanish word for light) was developed. The design for LUZinda incorporates motion sensors and ambient light sensors that communicate wirelessly via XBee with an Arduino. This Arduino analyzes the information received from these sensors and signals to adjust the lighting environment. The Arduino communicates with the artificial lighting sources in the room through the X10 protocol. This is achieved by using an X10 two-way interface that communicates with other X10 modules attached to all of the artificial lighting sources. Commands sent from the Arduino to the X10 modules via the two-way interface are able to dim, brighten, turn on, and turn off the lights independently. A simple user interface was also designed. This interface allows the user to tell LUZinda when they are satisfied with the lighting environment in the space. LUZinda is then able to “learn” and predict the user’s lighting preference, so it can adjust the lighting output automatically to ensure that the user is always satisfied with their environment. After testing, it was found that the LUZinda system adds between 3 and 3.5- Watts to the overall lighting load. However, given a room with two or more lights, this extra load is generally accounted for with the energy savings through dimming. The more artificial lighting sources there are in a room, the more energy savings LUZinda provides. Several recommendations have been made to further the flexibility and utility of LUZinda: the incorporation of zoning, the ability to distinguish between users and their varied tasks, creating a portable user interface for ease of use, designing and implementing an aesthetically appealing housing for sensor circuits and user interface, and improving the accuracy of motion detection.

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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International