Drexel Smart House Blog

This is a video of Jameson’s presentation of Drexel Smart House at IgnitePhilly this past Tuesday at Johhny Brenda’s.

“Ignite is a series of speakers talking about inspiring projects for 5 minutes. The presentations can be serious, funny, or somewhere in between.” Also, the presentations must be exactly 20 slides, and they rotate automatically every 15 seconds. Make sure to check out some of the other presentations. There were a lot of great presenters.

First, to all the students, welcome back to school (or just to school if you’re a freshman). Be on the lookout for emails as we will be having some events coming up very soon!

This next academic year promises a very exciting one. We have just chosen the final design for the renovation of the house and expect to make a formal announcement in the coming months. It is a really great, exciting, and innovative design that will make a great home for everyone’s ideas.

We’ve also got a lot of exciting research going on ranging from multitouch to modular walls and floors to a new product from a collaboration with CeeLite. We’ve received funding for several projects we’re working on this year (more details to come), and we have a lot of great ideas for students for engineering freshman and senior design. (We will have details up soon, but feel free to contact us at info@drexelsmarthouse.com if you are interested.)

Lastly, we are working on updating our website to include more information about our current work, opportunities to get involved, etc. You can also expect many more updates on this blog as things are really picking up steam here. We also hope to produce some video content every month or so. (Contact us if you would like to help with that!)

Anyway, we’re excited about this next year, and we hope you’ll come along with us for the ride.

Jameson Detweiler
Drexel Smart House President

Thursday, October 16, 2008 @5pm
The Comcast Center

Be apart of the excitement!!!  This year marks our 6th Anniversary!  It will be a festive networking evening celebrating the momentum of green building in the Delaware Valley. Come mingle with the who’s who of Green Building and celebrate the chapters tremendous success.

Liberty Property Trust is hosting this exciting event at the Comcast Center. Our event is open to the public and we expect approximately 500 guests from the design and development community.

DVGBC will provide horsdoeuvres and a cash bar.

Come see and learn about The Comcast Center - the newest, tallest and greenest member of the Philadelphia skyline.

Receive a copy of the Philadelphia Business Journal’s green building insert for their Real Estate edition.

Keynote Speaker Mark Alan Hughes, Philadelphia’s newly appointed Director of Sustainability.

Kick-off for the new DVGBC website and brand.

DVGBC’s Annual Leadership Award presentation

You won’t want to miss this event… Register Now!!!

Early Bird Registration is only $15 for students, $20 at the door! Click here to register

The event flyer can be viewed here.

INTR 799 - SUSTAINABILITY SEMINAR

This is a seminar on Sustainable Design that asks the advanced student to understand and process the meanings and implications of sustainable design in order to develop a pragmatic interpretation and working assessment of this movement as it applies to design and related fields. In this course, students will explore concepts and methodologies and develop an understanding of the interrelationship of nature, technology and humanity through assigned readings and class discussions, field trips, and a team research and design charrette.

The class will run this summer from Monday June 30th through Wednesday July 30th. The class will meet Mondays and Wednesday from 9-12.

Below is a video of one of the presentations held this past Tuesday, June 3, 2008. This particular Freshman Design Presentation was chosen as one of the “Best” Engineering 103 Design Presentations.

Intuitive Interface Design for Home Control Systems in the Drexel Smart House from Drexel Smart House on Vimeo.

In contrast to the rapid development of home automation equipment and smart home capabilities, comparatively less attention has been paid to the development of comprehensive, comfortable and self explaining user interfaces. This is acknowledged to be an important obstacle for the broad success of smart home ideas and products.

Drexel Smart House has received a $20,000 Product Innovation Grant from Pittsburgh based Green Building Alliance (GBA) to develop a product from CeeLite’s Light Emitting Capacitor (LEC) technology. CeeLite has been a Drexel Smart House partner for several months now. This grant allow us to work together to create an innovative product, not only for the Smart House, but also for people everywhere. The project overview is below:

“Drexel University is leading a team to use CeeLite’s LEC technology to develop a commercially viable lighting prototype for residential lighting applications that is cost effective, energy efficient and provides interior illumination with daylight qualities. Because the CeeLite LEC panel is a luminous surface, it is necessary to alter the perception of what constitutes a residential luminary, or light fixture, which will require a different methodology for lighting design itself. A well-designed prototype using LEC technology has the potential of being commercialized, manufactured and distributed for residential lighting applications.”

Dr. Gena Ellis, Drexel Smart House adviser and Interior Design professor, is the primary investigator for the grant. Faculty from the College of Engineering are also involved.

Students who may be interested in working on this project should e-mail info@drexelsmarthouse.com. The original announcement can be found here at GBA’s website.

Drexel Smart House recently concluded the first phase of its design competition for its 35th and Race St., Philadelphia home. Many Drexel students from across the university entered the competition, but only four teams were able to meet the extensive requirements for entering their designs. College of Engineering students Joseph Andracchio and Matthew McRae focused on the technology side of the project, identifying many great technologies and ideas that the Smart House team had never thought of before. The one-man architecture team of Nicholas McDonough created a well thought out design that did a very good job of maintaining the history of the house.

The second place team of Aleksandra Wolchasty, Darby Kline, Kara Haggerty, all architecture students, came up with a beautiful design that “seeks to strike a balance where sustainability efforts can work in conjunction with emerging technology.” They accomplished that and more. The design has green outdoor space on every floor, and the house has a skylight in the center allowing for a large amount of natural light throughout the entire building. The team won $200 for their efforts.

The first place team of Carly Litofsky and Patrick Hoffman, also architecture students, created a design that took the entire site into account by creating a beautiful backyard that transitions into a stone patterned glass indoor green space. This team did a great job of preserving the character of the house while adding features that caused the design to stand out from the original home design. The team won $600 for their efforts.

Both the first and second place teams will move onto a second phase of the design competition. During this second phase, the teams will be expanded to included engineering, construction management, and other students from many majors at Drexel University. Additionally, the teams will work with many professors throughout Drexel and consult industry experts. The teams will compete with each other to develop two fully developed designs. One of these designs will become the Drexel Smart House. The second phase of the competition should conclude at the end of Spring 2008.
More info on the designs can be found at the main website.

Click on the links below to see what books are available in the Hagerty library at Drexel University in some key areas.

Smart Structures
Smart Materials
Intelligent Buildings
Green Buildings
Energy and homes
smart Home

To find additional books, search in our online catalog using Advanced Keyword Searching and using appropriate research keywords.

Electronic BooksClick on the links below to access electronic books (Access only to Drexel faculty and students)
You can access full book chapters using electronic book collections such as ASM Handbooks, ebrary, ENGnetBASE, ENVIROnetBASE, Knovel, MATERIALSnetBASE and Referex)

ASM Handbooks
ebrary
ENGnetBASE
ENVIROnetBASE
Knovel: Engineering and Scientific Online References
MATERIALSnetBASE
Referex - electronic books

Electronic Databases

Use databases below to find scholarly journal articles on the topic of your research project.

Architectural Index
ASCE Civil Engineering Database
Annual Reviews
BuildingGreen
(BuildingGreen Suite integrates online versions of GreenSpec, Environmental Building News, and a database of more than 160 high-performance building case studies.)
Earthquake Engineering Abstracts
Ei Compendex and INSPEC
Environmental Engineering Abstracts
GeoRef
Google Scholar
IEEE Xplore
MAD CAD (NOTE: access to cross-referenced collections of building, electrical, mechanical, plumbing, fire, and maintenance codes from BOCA, SBCCI, ICBO, ICC, and NFPA.)
ScienceDirect
Thomas Telford Journals Online - on trial until December 2007

News and Recent Developments

Use the following databases to find information on breaking news related to Smart House developments.

Academic Universe(Lexis/Nexis)
Expanded Academic
Factiva
Proquest

For more assistance, please refer to: Engineering Reference Assistance

IntelliSTRUCT is a research program run by SINTEF Fisheries and Aquaculture and funded by the Research Council of Norway.

The objective of the program is to develop intelligent ocean structures for fishery and aquacultural applications.

The scope is to combine the disciplines of hydrodynamics, structural mechanics, cybernetics and fish ethology to design structures that adapt to the sealoads and optimise the well-being of the fish.

Access this site at: IntelliSTRUT

WildCharge just opened their webstore today. WildCharge is the first company to introduce wireless power to the marketplace. The charging base and an adapter for RAZR cellphones are now available. You simply switch your battery cover on your RAZR with their replacement cover, plug the charging base into the wall, and set the phone onto the surface of the base.

This is just the first of several products coming out. Other companies will be coming out with chargers that can transmit power over short distances through the air. These solutions will not be ready for at least a few years though.

You can access the WildCharge webstore here.