For the semester3 Applied Electricity project, a conventional table fan was developed by adding some smartness to it.
Objectives
Develop a AC voltage regulator circuit.
Adding smartness to the table fan using a sensory system.
Motivation
Sometimes the user needs to control the fan speed while moving around. It's troublesome for to find the remote controller and spend time for that. When the user is near the fan he won’t need much speed. But if he is far away from the fan, the fan speed must be high.
The solution was pretty simple; put a distance measuring sensor to the regulator and control the speed according to the sensor feedback. It was hard to implement this concept to the available regulators thus we thought of making our own AC voltage regulator.
The regulator has a TRIAC which switches power and regulates by modifying the AC waveform. A typical induction motor (in table fans) was used as well.
Ultrasonic Ranging Module HC - SR04 was used with an Arduino development board. All the circuitry were first simulated using Proteus.
The TERA Fan has two operating modes; manual and automatic. In the manual mode, user can interact with the device directly from the keypad, similar to conventional fans. In the automatic mode, the fan speed will vary according to the distance from the fan to the user.
Future works
With the implementation of Arduino, this device enables further developments focusing on smart home concepts. Following can be suggested as future works,
Use a thermal sensor (Omron's thermal IR sensor) to read the heat signatures (people) of the environment (room) so that the oscillation of the fan can be adjusted to reach those thermal signatures only.
Implement Bluetooth, FM transceiver, IR receiver so that the device can be used for IOT applications; smart home.
I was leading this project. Overall, the project was a success. The device worked pretty well during the demonstration. The wooden stand, enclosure box added more value to the total system. Not a single commercially available circuit (voltage regulator) was used in the project and all the components were either custom made (electronic circuits) or assembled / wired by the group members.
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