Very Small Information Systems/Spring 2006/Group A/Intelligent Humidity and Heating Control

The background for the system is, that one of the authors of this article have experienced the problem with damage to a summerhouse, first hand. Due to the lack of any monitoring device, some of the wooden construction in the house incurred damage. This damage could possibly have been avoided had a monitoring device alerted the owners to the fact that border values was being exceeded.

Wooden houses are known to have problems with low temperatures and extremes of relative humidity. It is known that wooden houses, and in particular summerhouses, that are not occupied all year round, need to be monitored to make sure that humidity and temperature does not exceed certain levels. Therefore our systems primary goal is to help avoid woodwork damages caused by humidity. This is solved through monitoring and adjustment of the indoors climate. This is done through the use of intelligent humidity and temperature control, and remote monitoring by use of a built in webserver. In addition, the system is capable of logging data about its surrounding conditions, enabling improvement of the enclosed algorithms. To support the control of humidity, we have developed a range of hardware devices providing the necessary inputs and enabling the actual environment control.

Papers

See our detailed projectplan using this link. The projectplan is now outdated, as the project has been handed in at the 31st of May 2006.

The handed in WoodSaver article is available here.

During the project, we have made three guides, one is for inserting figures in latex, by converting the figures to PDF. The other two are howto documents explaining how to construct a relay and an input simulator with a potentiometer and a voltage follower.

Sourcecode: check out our module 'WoodSaver' from the sourceforge.net project 'wsis' or use the web access.

Hardware guides

The two hardware guides are available here:

• Howto: Construction of a 220V relay
• Howto: Construction of a voltage follower/input simulator

Inserting Figures in Latex

An easy way of inserting a figure in latex is this:

• Print the figure to a .pdf file.
• Crop the PDF file by using Adobe Acrobat, so it only takes up the necessary space (Tools/Advanced editing/Crop tool).
• Save the PDF file in a subfolder of your latex directory called figures.
• To insert the figure in latex, insert the following:

   \begin{figure}
       \includegraphics{figures/name_of_pdf-file}
       \caption{Insert text describing the figure.}
       \label{fig:examplefigure1}
   \end{figure}

• You can reference the figure by using the syntax

   "As shown in Figure \ref{fig:examplefigure1}."