The idea
The idea is to implement smart control of solar screens: based on indoor temperature, actual solar incidence (measured), weather predictions (e.g. retrieved from a web service) and some simple policies the screens should go up/down, in such way that the level of additional heating (from fossil fuels,...) can be minimised. A (well-insulated) house can be seen as a "heat-capacitor", which you want to see filled just at the right level: buffer sufficient heat in order to minimize the amount of additional heating needed, but don't overfill the buffer so the house gets too warm (and might require active cooling).
Example policies: if tomorrow will be cold and rainy, allow the sun to heat up the room to 23 deg Celsius (so no heating will be needed tomorrow); if it will be sunny and warm tomorrow, block the sun as soon as the indoor temperature hits 20 deg (to avoid overheating).
Manual override, and remote monitoring/control would be accessible from a smartphone application. For the actual control of the solar screens, being able to send the RF signals as produced by the current remote (Somfy Telis) would be great, but for the basic experiment (done in the scope of a hackathon), a Fibaro roler shutter control unit (Z-wave based) is used.
Only the very basics of this idea are covered in the project below - please note that below is a proof of concept implementation, not a fully completed project.
Basic implementation
An smartliving.io kit was used; in a basic set-up, just two temperature sensors are used as input (as well as a LED output - which is not really used).
Also, a Roller Shutter gateway device custom-built by AllThingsTalk is used which exposes a motor control actuator out of the box.
Once the sensor inputs are brought to the platform, the smartliving.io platform is used to trigger the shutter actuator based on the temperature values.
In order to complete the project, more complex rules need to be added. Additionally, the weather predictions should be retrieved from an online weather service.







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