To provide building occupants with ‘live’ data to show on KyotoTV and in the Kyoto energy management application, some ground work has to carried out to ensure ‘data’ from the building can be extracted and retrieved regularly. The building itself usually has a number of energy meters that count ‘pulses’ of usage over time and report back to a central building management system (BMS). These meters can be recording anything from total building energy usage (kW), outside air temperature (°C), office temperature (°C), car park lighting (kW) etc.
To make things that little bit harder, there are a number of different building management systems – all performing similar tasks, to monitor building energy usage and performance. So at OuterArc, we’ve had to become ‘amateur experts’ in quickly working out how we can extract the data out of these systems at regular intervals so we can get the data onto our servers and into our application.
I recently had the chance to head down to one of our client sites and take some photos of KyotoTV ‘in action’ – displaying live data to building occupants, raising awareness of usage and making energy more visible in the building.
It’s always nice to see things on the big screen so take a look at a couple of photos:
You will see from the photos that the KyotoTV background is a light grey that was due to the cloud and snow that day. We have found that small features such as getting the latest weather conditions and having them as part of KyotoTV makes it seem that much more ‘real’ to people.
Look out for a full KyotoTV case study coming soon.
-Aaron
PS. Ignore the mouse cursor left in the middle of the screen, a person, who wishes to remain anonymous, forgot to move it!
Happy New Year to everyone out there! We wish you a very prosperous 2010.
January is shaping up to be a very busy month for us but hopefully we'll have time for a couple of blog posts as well.
-Aaron
After recent announcements by the UK government, the media is awash with news on smart meters, the smart grid and how the landscape of the UK’s energy market will totally change by 2020. So, what does this all mean? Well, a smart meter shows you how much energy you are using at any one time and can provide details on how much usage is costing. This will mean the end of estimated billing as exact current and historical usage will be logged accurately.
When smart meters become ubiquitous, suppliers and regional distributers will have a much better understanding of how much electricity is being used at any point in time. Gaining this insight into electricity usage using the technology of smart meters is part of the idea behind the smart grid - An ‘intelligent’ power grid, where electricity can be supplied to consumers more efficiently by communicating information between the grid and the meters. There is much more to the smart grid than the brief summary here, for more resources see the end of this article.
Everything we make is constantly evolving. We are always discussing the next cool feature we could add. However, every product has to start somewhere and learning lessons from guys like 37 Signals, we like to keep our product development process pretty simple. It normally starts off with a brain storming session, bouncing ideas around and ending up with some rough sketches. We go over the sketches and mock up the design and layout, without any functionality and have another look at what we end up with. We then review the features we want in version one and go away and produce it.
KyotoTV is no exception and I’ve included some screenshots here of the early development:
