11–20 of 185 posts
Awesome post. Who was the cranky researcher who developed the climate-controlled window system with the Linux box and python scripts? I want to do the same thing.
It's very MIT. It's also an illustration of what went wrong with the "internet of things" concept. Sensors are easy today. Actuators are hard. Most "IoT" things can't do much. Try to buy a home power window. They exist. They're an exotic luxury home item. Even controllable home HVAC dampers are rare. It makes good sense to have a system where windows, fans, dampers, heaters, and compressors are all coordinated to max…
And I'd prefer a mechanized window, myself.
There's something so beautiful about a place so dysfunctional that you can't even replace standard office equipment; I know it was alluded to in the article, but in case anyone forgot, the MIT Media Lab played a part in Jeffery Epstein and he often leveraged it for good PR https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/07/business/mit-media-lab-je...
Some quick additional info, since I wasn’t familiar with all the context. I am glad I looked deeper, I am ashamed to admit I assumed some wrongdoing given he had resigned! Wikipedia notes that he “...resigned from his position[19] as director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, in protest of the Media Lab's involvement with Epstein.”[0] [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethan_Zuckerman#Career
He's landed on his feet very well. He has a temporary position at Columbia this fall, and then will be starting a tenured job at UMass Amherst next year.
Remember when they chased Aaron Swartz to commit suicide and never gave him a civil disobedience award?
Remember their extremely close links to Jeffrey Epstein?
Sorry but MIT media Lab is absolute trash and an embarrassment to the MIT name.
It's very MIT. It's also an illustration of what went wrong with the "internet of things" concept. Sensors are easy today. Actuators are hard. Most "IoT" things can't do much. Try to buy a home power window. They exist. They're an exotic luxury home item. Even controllable home HVAC dampers are rare. It makes good sense to have a system where windows, fans, dampers, heaters, and compressors are all coordinated to max…
Yup. True home automation is something that changes your life, not gadgets for rich people. I will call true home automation for example when I can throw the trash into a hatch at my same floor in a bag with RFID tag so that it will send it down and sort out it for recycle. I recall when I was less than 10 (mid '70s) my grandparents having those hatches (minus electronics of course) in their building. They would leav…
One day I opened it and it was just a cutout of the floor, directly over the washing machine in the basement below. I'm not sure if that's lazy or genius, but it doesn't get much easier than that I guess.
It's very MIT. It's also an illustration of what went wrong with the "internet of things" concept. Sensors are easy today. Actuators are hard. Most "IoT" things can't do much. Try to buy a home power window. They exist. They're an exotic luxury home item. Even controllable home HVAC dampers are rare. It makes good sense to have a system where windows, fans, dampers, heaters, and compressors are all coordinated to max…
Yup. True home automation is something that changes your life, not gadgets for rich people. I will call true home automation for example when I can throw the trash into a hatch at my same floor in a bag with RFID tag so that it will send it down and sort out it for recycle. I recall when I was less than 10 (mid '70s) my grandparents having those hatches (minus electronics of course) in their building. They would leav…
It's very MIT. It's also an illustration of what went wrong with the "internet of things" concept. Sensors are easy today. Actuators are hard. Most "IoT" things can't do much. Try to buy a home power window. They exist. They're an exotic luxury home item. Even controllable home HVAC dampers are rare. It makes good sense to have a system where windows, fans, dampers, heaters, and compressors are all coordinated to max…
CNC retrofits (even when successful) tend to be never ending projects. This is partly because the kind of person who retrofits a machine is seldom satisfied with it.
But also one tends to end up replacing the whole machine over time - the motion and way the machine gets used is different. The "wear cycle" is accelerated and new machine properties become important. Retrofits also are much more challenging to support than factory-supplied systems and tend to "frankenstein" very quickly.
IOT windows might start making real sense as an aspect of a whole building design where they can be fit for purpose, designed for expected wear and usage and work harmoniously with other building systems.
A truly native IOT window will involve the frame, the glass, the opener, maybe the shades -- and the rest of the building. We probably also need standardised "window sockets" around the frames, with standards for power and data connections to make installation, replacement and upgrade practical.
Awesome post. Who was the cranky researcher who developed the climate-controlled window system with the Linux box and python scripts? I want to do the same thing.
Same, but it seems overkill. I'm in an old office where the only openable window is consumed by a window A/C unit. I want to put a 120mm fan in a small opening next to it that'll turn on when it's more than 3C cooler outside, and more than 24C inside. Seems like an Arduino would do it.
- Comfort is a function of multiple factors, not just the dry bulb temperature difference. It includes occupant metabolism, insulation from clothing, radiant heat exchange, air speed, and humidity. This is trivial to solve in the case of a single-person office (just give them control of the window), but more complex once you have multiple occupants with different needs, who are in different locations in the office. I wonder if there's value in using reinforcement learning to customize natural ventilation to optimize the comfort of multiple occupants.
- Predicting the temperature the next day, and using a fan to draw in cold night time air into your HVAC ducts when a hot morning/afternoon is expected. This way you can have a reservoir off cool air you can access the next day.
- Once you have multiple rooms, and a tall building, there's multiple effects that are worth attempting to coordinate. For example you could coordinate the ventilation of the building air with the stack effect and wind-driven air through the windows, or coordinate the cross-ventilation horizontally through multiple rooms. This would not just modulate temperatures, but also satisfy indoor air quality needs traditionally achieved through the HVAC.
Typically a lot of fine-tuning of natural ventilation isn't done because the actual energy/comfort impact for one of these ideas is small relative to complexity of building the system, and the large uncertainty associated with the dynamics of airflow. But my general hypothesis is that with the integration of cheap prediction or RL methods, we can reduce that uncertainty which would permit a more long-tail approach where we can combine multiple small improvements.