DAFNE CM
SMARTICS: INTELLIGENT POWER STRIP
Electricity background
Many of the appliances in the home require a certain quota of resources, but in busy lives like nowadays people certainly do not tend to have the time to have a schedule or control for their processes and thus the demand for these resources tends to grow while used in dead time. Related to energy usage, in urban areas of Mexico 76% of the used energy comes from electricity.
In Mexico’s households, 91.5% have a TV, 71% a washing machine, and 62% an iron among other appliances.
This problem is caused due to the wrong management of the required resources and time of use for the daily activities commonly seen in households.
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Currently, automation systems cover many aspects of our life; like all areas of industry, and now our houses. The use of automation techniques as domotics, helps us to perform our activities effectively and comfortably. This in conjunction with the care of the basic resources in housing has become a priority, based on the control of both economic and energy expenditure. However, nowadays the companies that currently manage home automation in the market have always done so considering the user as the main beneficiary of this system. We believe that there is a strong opportunity to also consider nature by performing automation focused mainly not only on the comfort of the human being itself but also on the reduction of waste of resources in each home.
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Target market
Age: 20 to 60 years old
Class: Middle, Upper-Middle, Upper.
Our target market is people between 20 to 60 years old in the middle, upper-middle, and upper class with an interest in the environment and reducing costs.
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Product design criteria
For the design process, the ideal scenario in which the device would be used had to be established. From this ideal scenario, we started to consider other non-optimal scenarios on which the device could be involved in order to detect areas of opportunity and cover as many possible failures as we could.
The ideal scenario that was concluded is the following one:
The device is capable of working in a household environment, preferably out of reach to children but optional since it is well isolated and capable of withstanding considerable physical trauma. The device must not exceed a large current draw, meaning it should only be used within the limits established per module purpose, for instance, a living room module can be used in a limited amount of devices found in the kitchen area.
The device remains in a manual mode if the master module hasn’t found a suitable connection to a local WiFi network and returns to the wireless assisted mode whenever a suitable client has logged in the home network.
Functional decomposition
It is necessary to perform an analysis of the behavior of each component and their interaction with other functional areas or modules.
Applying the functional decomposition analysis to our power strip idea, helps to integrate each module to fully understand how the product will work and its composition. In the next figure, the decomposition diagram and the existing relations between the modules considered for the project are depicted.
