What is this thing?

During my freshman year, one of my design classes entailed of working in a group of 8 people to build a project that could be potentially useful to us. After brainstorming various ideas, removing the ones that might be difficult to accomplish (such as asteroid diverter), we settled on Lumos: a smart window.

Lumos is a system that we designed to optimize a window and blind for regulating temperature and light. Using sensors, the system will detect whether to open or close the blinds using a servo based on the amount of light outside, so people can wake up due to "natural light". Additionally, the sensors would also detect the temperatue inside and outside, and potentially open the window based off of these temperatures. To accurately convey and test this, we constructed a model out of foamcore and wired a system using an Arduino. My part of the project consisted of designing the sliding mechanism of the window and compiling the engineering notebook.

Slide Design

For the hardware component of the project, the most critical part was to design a mechanism that would allow for a window pane to move back and forth based on the sensor data. Potential designs and sketchs are shown below.

After comparing the various possible designs, we ended up going with the linear slide design, based on the compactness of design, as well as cost and time efficiency. More detailed reasoning and additional information on our design process can be found in our Engineering Notebook here.

Linear Slide Design

For linear slides to move, the are commonly powered using a string in one direction and let gravity do the work in the other direction. However, because the linear slide will be sideways in our case, we needed a different solution.

To solve this, I designed a dual string linear slide system. This dual string loosens one string while tightening the other, which pulls on the linear slide when rotating in either direction.

The window pane made out of foam core was then attached to the linear slide and powered using a motor.

Friendship

At the end of the project, we got to present our project to the entire class and engineering deans, that gave us feedback on our project. Even though the design and manufacturing of the product was not the greatest, I am thankful that I got the chance to work with people that I know will be lifelong friends :].