Sophisticated 1:4 Scale Internet of Things Model Home for K-12 STEM Outreach

EasyChair Preprint 724

Abstract

LANA Advanced Systems, a multidisciplinary Capstone Project team, has designed and built a quarter scale model home and embedded system interface board to connect control modules to enable K-12 students to interact with a high quality educational manipulative to foster interest in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) topics. This model home, or Home Automated Networking System (HANS), is four feet wide, eight feet long, three feet high, and has a roof with a one foot peak. HANS is equipped with six different sensors in each room; these sensors are ambient light, ambient temperature, relative humidity, pressure, moisture level, and motion detection. All sensor data is processed through an intelligence board, the Texas Instruments CC3200, to a cloud platform, Cayenne, and is displayed for user interaction. HANS is also equipped with control modules. These control modules include servo motors for automatic window shades, a front door lock, zone control air vents, and motion flags. HANS is also equipped with five cameras located around the model home. One in each room that displays a live view of the control modules, and one outside that shows the heat lamp simulators and the exterior of the house.

The purpose of HANS is to be an educational manipulative for STEM outreach in K-12 education. Teachers from around Texas will come to Texas A&M to learn more about STEM topics, and HANS will help facilitate this learning. When these teachers return to their schools with this new knowledge, they will also be able to access HANS to run experiments remotely with students. This can be accomplished through Cayenne, a cloud based service , and the WyzeCam smartphone application which displays live and recorded video feeds from the house . Over the course of 10 months, LANA Advanced Systems has designed and built HANS. The design process included electrical design as well as mechanical, structural, and software design.

Keyphrases: Capstone, Door lock, Engineering Technology, Home Automation, Interface board, Internet of Things, IoT, K-12, Model Home, Outreach, STEM, STEM outreach, Smart Home, ambient light, conceptual block diagram, connected devices, control module, educational manipulative, electronic system, electronic system engineering technology, electronics system engineering, functional requirement, home automated networking system, intelligence board, lana advanced system, private sector, scaled model home, senior undergraduate student, sensor data, system engineering technology, technology major, texa instrument cc3200, undergraduate, window blind

@booklet{EasyChair:724,
  author    = {Luke Kindelin and Joseph Morgan and Jacob Brookins and Avery Tijerina and Abigail Morris},
  title     = {Sophisticated 1:4 Scale Internet of Things Model Home for K-12 STEM Outreach},
  doi       = {10.29007/fd8d},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 724},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2019}}