GBC Ink Capstone

Hi, We have ditched the idea of taking information straight from the BACnet client and putting it through Node-Red and into cloud, instead we can explore a different option, MQTT. MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) protocol is an open source protocol which can be run on the Raspberry Pi 3 and Node-Red. This protocol is mostly used for sensor networks where there is a massive amount of data being transferred to a single point. To make a connection to MQTT we can either use another Raspberry Pi 3, NodeMCU Esp8266 or Arduino Wifi. Arduino Wifi is the oldest out of all of them and Raspberry Pi 3 seems like overkill, so we will explore the NodeMCU Esp8266. The NodeMCU Esp8266 has WiFi capabilities and therefore can connect with MQTT. We will be programming it through Arduino, for a quick start guide on how to set it up for Arduino please visit  here . Assuming everything is set up, we need to install the WiFi and pubsub libraries which can be done by going tools, manag...

Hi, The Raspberry Pi 3 runs the Linux operating system, it has WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities as well as many other functions. We mainly use the GPIO, Python, Node-Red and the Wifi for our projects. Node-Red is an open source programming tool for hardware devices, APIs and online services. Node-Red is a visual flow based programming language where you can use JAVA, C as well as other user made libraries to create different flows and do many different cool things with it. We will be exploring the BACnet library today. The library itself is called the node-red-contrib-bacnet. The few nodes available can be found below. The nodes tell us we are able to read BACnet objects off the BACnet network, write on the network and do BACnet commands on the network. We will be mainly exploring the BACnet-Read and BACnet-Write. For those of you that don't know BACnet, it is an open source protocol used in teh building automation industry that communicates between BACnet client devices us...

Greetings, One of the groups have finished linking up to cloud and now we have a way to send data, our group is going to be doing something else. We are planning to create a simulation of a smart building which includes the different projects of what everyone is doing. This will be essentially a base framework which can replace all the simulations that we will be creating virtually with the completed capstone projects, for example, our lighting simulation will be replaced by the condominium lighting groups project. This base framework will involve, integration, energy management, smart building, connection to cloud and multiple other areas. The tools we will be using in this project, will be the following which does not include everything as we are still expanding upon it. - 1 EasyIO - 1 Reliable ProCom - 2 BASpi - 2 Raspberry Pi - 3 LED lights - 3 VAV boxes - Thermistors - Photocells - Shaders - Multitude of wires, cables, capacitors, diodes and resistors - Router and ...

Greetings, This week our team helped other teams with their capstone projects. The one we were working on was the Condominium lights with the green button, we tried to use this button to control the lights through an ESP8266 programmed to toggle, but we were having issues with flickering we eventually figured out the reason why and we are going to fix it next week. Button layout, it is a Form C The ESP8266 we are using is from NodeMCU. It operates at 4.5V-10v usb powered. It has WiFi and IO capabilities. ESP8266 from NodeMCU By utilizing a toggle code, we can effectively toggle the lights without a toggle button allowing us to press the button once to turn on all relays for the lights and again to turn off all relays for the lights. The LED lights were working with are 36 VDC. The code we used to toggle relays Initially the group that was working on the lights programmed the toggle wrong, so we had to fix up their code. Once the code was working more issues popped up...

Greetings, For this week’s capstone, the group did a bit of research instead of working to complete an integration or getting hardware to work. There are many different services offered by Microsoft Azure such general, computing, networking, storage, web mobile, databases, analytics, AI, IoT, and many other services. We wanted to learn more about these services, so we created a couple of items. We tried Azure Cloud Database for MySQL, IoT Hub, Storage account, SQL database, Azure Cosmos DB, Virtual Network, DDoS protection and SQL Server. The goal of this research was to save sensor data directly from device to database using Node-Red, and the next step would be to do it through WiFi using a device such as ESP8266.         Node red has nodes designed for Microsoft Azure, we tried using the Azure SQL, database and Blob. We kept getting a disconnect or error on login even though the information we input was correct. This means that the way we set ...

Greetings, Today we worked with a device from Microsoft called the MXChip IoT DevKit. The board comes with a lot of different sensors built in, it is programmed through Visual Studio Code and requires Arduino IDE as well as a Microsoft Azure Account. This board runs on 3.3V and we can easily provide this by plugging it into a computer with a Micro USB cable. We used the following steps to set it up. 1. Download Arduino IDE, Visual Studio Code and ST-Link/V2 and install. 2. After entering Visual Studio Code, we need to download the Arduino and Azure IoT Tools add on to program them by going to the marketplace on the left hand side. We can enter Arduino and Azure IoT tools into the search bar to find them and install them. 3. After installing them, at the top right corner, go to File > Preferences > Settings and in the search bar, enter settings.json. After locating settings.json open it and enter the following "arduino.path": ...