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By Zhao Yu, CHEN | Yi, ZHENG | Mingxuan, LIU

Hong Kong weather is famous for its unpredictability, and rain can turn to shine in a matter of seconds. If windows are open and no one is at home, household items can be easily wet. This project is to develop a smart window so that it can detect rain and close the window automatically. The design and the window for demonstration can be found in Fig. 1. The small robot car is to slide the window. The material to build the demonstration is recyclable. Its weight is light so that a small voltage is good enough to move the window. To detect the rain, a temperature and humidity sensor, and a wind speed sensor are used. According to the environment in Hong Kong, their thresholds are 25 ℃, 80% humidity, and 20 km/h respectively. When the measured values are higher than the threshold, the system closes the window.

Window Design

Window design build and robot car

Fig. 1

The demonstration video is shown below.

Comment by judges: The original idea is not bad but the demonstration is not very good. First, there is no live demonstration and almost all other teams can provide live demonstrations. Moreover, the window cannot be opened properly (i.e., pull out but not slide the window). Finally, the mechanism to open the window is very difficult to implement in Hong Kong apartments.

Organizer "Microcontroller Application Design Contest (2016-17)" Department of Electronic and Information Engineering The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
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