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Role

Back-end Development, Android Development

Responsibilities

Putting together my half of the report, creating UI for the Android application that would communicate with our devices

Technologies

Android, Raspberry Pi, Bluetooth, Smart Home Technology

Ubiquitous Computing - Smart Oven Interface

Our Ubiquitous Computing course was all about the future of computing and how we would implement both smart home systems and eventually smart city systems into our world. We spent a lot of the course reading and writing about ubiquitous computing concepts, but we got the opportunity with our final project to write or build something ourselves. I worked with Scott McClelland and we decided to build something as he had some experience in engineering things and was willing to buy some of the parts required for a smart oven interface.

The goal of our project was to create an interface that would work with pre-existing/older ovens and still offer smart home capabilities. The big problem we found was that there will be thousands of new smart devices created but all pre-existing appliances would become obsolete. Our goal was to attempt to address this issue by creating an interface that would mount onto your oven’s interface and interact with it for you. The mounted unit would be able to be controlled by your smart home system through Bluetooth and have a generic API making it easy to adopt.

We ended up creating two mounted interfaces, one for turning dials, and another for pressing buttons. These interfaces were controlled with a mock-up Android application that controlled them through Bluetooth. This application was meant to represent a smart home application of sorts that would handle all of your smart appliances. I have added the materials we used to build both interfaces in the gallery section. We were pretty happy with the results because we achieved what we set out to do, which was make an ‘unsmart’ device a smart device! It was not a perfect interface and had a few big issues such as the amount of power required for the interfaces, but there are solutions to this we just didn’t have time to work it out.

Some images of the dial turning and button pressing unit as well as the materials used to build both

If you would like to read our full report on this project which includes build details as well as some of the conclusions we came to please contact me about it and I would be more than happy to send it over.