My basic rule of thumb is ‘Smart Home bad, Smart Building good’* so this one was interesting. Specifically, it’s about Project Sandstar, which is described as the first entity of its kind – a fully open-source, hardware-agnostic building automation system.
The work – originally a fault detection and diagnostics system for two on-campus buildings – started at University of California, Davis. Ambitions grew, however, when it became a Sedona-based project (an open-source building automation framework).
Note that in its first year of deployment, the completed system – which cost $5,000 to develop – helped UC Davis identify roughly $40,000 worth of leaks via a connected flow meter. Furthermore, it seems the university could additionally save up to $1 million annually by implementing the technology across its entire campus.
Integration
The idea is that new devices and systems can be integrated using Sedona via the engine’s driver abstraction layer – a plug-and-play process.
The data generated is orchestrated by the Skyspark analytics platform, with visualisation through Anka Labs’ Visualytik dashboards. Users can drill down to specific devices or data types, such as historic zone temperatures for a particular cluster or the real-time operational status of an individual controller…
Project Sandstar can also transmit commands directly to any connected devices or subsystems. This is all built around the low-power BeagleBone Green devices (right).
Components
The project has a number of components:
Sandstar. A fully open-source, hardware-agnostic controls engine with a built-in driver abstraction layer to enable seamless connectivity with different hardware devices.
Project Haystack. An open-source semantic data model designed to streamline and standardise the data generated from IoT devices.
Sedona. An open-source building automation framework based on Niagara and intended for resource-limited devices. Sedona uses an easy to understand declarative programming language that’s designed specifically for describing control logic.
SkySpark/Analytik. An analytics platform that orchestrates and analyses data generated by smart devices and equipment systems.
ArcBeam. A secure WebSocket communication platform that enables clustered haystack communication and safe data transfers.
Visualytik. An intuitive data visualisation tool developed by Anka Labs with the capacity to create and display dashboards through flow-based programming.
Mobilytik. A companion to Visualytik that enables Haystack data visualisation via a smartphone app.
BeagleBone Green (BBG). An open-source, low cost and expandable hardware platform, BBG is a differentiated version of BeagleBone Black (BBB) developed in partnership with SeeedStudio. It removes several of BBB’s extraneous features to offer the same performance with reduced power consumption.
And as for the project being open source, that’s another positive in my book.
Building automation
“We chose BeagleBone over similar hardware like Raspberry Pi because of its open-source Ethernet controller and additional I/O,” the piece quotes Alper Üzmezler, the man behind the project. “The hardware could simply do more – and at a lower cost.”
Looking ahead, he sees lots to build on smartly, as it were:
“With machine learning, our system could dynamically predict usage and environmental changes and adjust edge devices accordingly,” added Üzmezler. “LoRaWAN connectivity, meanwhile, would allow us to even further optimise performance and power usage. We’re also planning to eventually start deploying projects on BeagleV Fire.”
You can read the full case study in ‘BeagleBone Delivers Quadruple the Value at Half the Cost in Building Automation’ on the beagleboard.org website.
*If you are interested in my thoughts on this check out: IoT Design 2016: Smart Buildings good: Smart Homes bad
See also: DevBoard Watch: BeagleY-AI brings AI processor to the party
