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Automated Dorm Room Causes a School Inquiry
First time accepted submitter ElectronicHouseGrant writes "Freshman Derek Low rigged up his Berkeley dorm room with something he calls B.R.A.D., which is short for 'Berkeley Ridiculously Automated Dorm.' The room includes automated lighting, drapes, music, motion detection, and more. He can control everything through voice recognition, but a wireless remote, his iPhone and his iPad are also in on the control party. Derek started the install on February 4 and finished just a few days ago."
Maybe I missed something, but since the headline said school inquiry, shouldn't there be some info about that either in the blurb or the article it's linking to?
No explanation of what the hell that means in the summary.
And since the link is already Slashdotted, I can't investigate for myself.
You fail again, /.
Shame everything was blurred, maybe switch on autofocus next time eh?
http://people.csail.mit.edu/mhcoen/Globe/Globe.html
Eric Smalley
During romantic mode.
Article appears to be slasdotted..and sparse per prior posts. Any better links?
Oh that's right.. unlike the submitter or the eds.. I can use google.
http://www.livescience.com/20048-ridiculously-automated-dorm-room.html
http://www.berkeleyside.com/2012/05/01/cal-student-creates-a-ridiculously-automated-dorm/
http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-video-berkeleys-most-ridiculously-automated-dorm-room-ever-20120501,0,2225746.story
Silence is a state of mime.
In my dorm here in Italy it's illegal (as for in Dorm rules) just to put a chair from the kitchen in your room.
And anything like that would not have passed the montlhy control check.
"come up and see my BRAD" doesn't work for me!
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
The ALS Residence Initiative already built a paradigm-shift in skilled nursing care in Chelsea, MA. The Residence was built as part of the Leonard Florence Center for Living as a place for ALS/MS patients with severe disability to live with maximum independence and with the highest quality nursing care available.
The Residence was designed by my friend Steve Saling with his own long-term care requirements in mind. The building is stuffed with automation equipment from PEAC which enables people, who can only use their eyes to control a computer, to open doors, operate lights, call an elevator, or summon assistance (among other operations). The Residence is the first of its kind, and the ALSRI is committed to building these across the USA. The second facility is to be built near Atlanta, GA.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
I misread "inquiry" as "injury." Dang.
That just looks like a hodgepodge of cheap consumer crap he picked up at Home Depot and literally taped to the walls and ceiling of the dorm room. He even runs free apps on his Apple products to control that stuff.
Where's the fit and finish of quality hackery? Practically any geek with a spare couple of weekends could throw this together.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Some students waste their college time on 'pointless shit' like sports. Others play with gadgets. The only problem here is the messing with mains wiring. But then again, you can get badly injured on the football field, too...
always appear to be multiple occupants? I've always found that a bit weird.
It is to condition Americans to despise a) sharing and b) small living quarters, yielding a steady supply of cooperation- and organization-averse individualists who seek sprawl and thus fuel the real estate, automobile, & energy industries.
I was thinking similar. I was messing with X10 a decade ago, and it wasn't terribly new then. Very limiting. I was looking at really doing up the house with a project like this, but, over a wider area than a dorm, and I eventually want more intelligently controlled devices (RGB lights, I want to be able to go from soft white, to warm white, or rave/strobe mode)
In any case... X10 is cool and all, but, so basically all I need to do to really fuck with him is inject X10 from anywhere in his building...a dorm. ROTFL good luck kid. I bet he is going to find his shit going crazy at 4 am pretty soon.
I don't have those worries but...in a place as humorously "hostile" as a dorm where any of hundreds of people could just decide to mess with you, and watch the results! That is just asking for it. X10 doesn't have the first bit of message authentication or authorisation.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
sound like a band saw!
"Romantic mode. WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"
I like where he is going but dislike the disregard to safety in a dorm room. I've spec'd out Control 4 and Crestron/Lutron systems for homes that do just that and without the danger.
Yea, but X10 is cheap & simple plus works "most" of the time ... which presumably is adequate for this application. The bigger issue Derek will have is other people deciding to take control of his room since there aren't that many house/unit codes.
But hats off to him for a most excellent job!
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
X10 is one of those things that I think most people need to try at least once, just to get a sense of the problems (such as: "did it toggle?"). That's actually good for you. Then you get thinking about how to fix it, and keep around a cardboard box full of X10 stuff ("maybe some day I'll use this, for a less demanding application than something .. as critical as .. um .. turning on a light") for about 12 years until a girlfriend explains that dusty junk isn't coming along when you move in together.
X10: it's .. along the way.
I always assumed that it is because it is cheaper to put multiple people in one slightly larger room than to put each person in a separate room. I had no idea that in other countries college students can afford individual rooms.
There are other benefits to having a room-mate. If you get seriously sick in your room there is someone to 1. notice and 2. do something about it.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Really? That's news to me. I've never heard of an individual-occupancy dorm room, unless someone bought out the entire room. Plus, it'd be kinda hard for most American universities to move to that, since their dorm buildings are all decades old and designed for having roommates. University dorm buildings aren't exactly replaced on a frequent basis; they're giant concrete-and-steel buildings designed for a lifespan in the centuries I'm guessing. Plus, universities located inside cities typically don't have a lot of extra real estate to build nicer dorms that give students extra living space.
There's more to engineering than classwork. This kid's got it in his genes. Go Bears!
I am not impressed. I would be impressed if he made a sledding hill out of ice that doesn't melt but turns directly into gas!!!
Koalas. They're telepathic. Plus, they control the weather. -Margaret
Sounds nice and all; for new-construction dorms, it makes perfect sense to me, and I don't know why they didn't do it before. Probably just to save the tiny bit of money that the additional wall costs. However, for older dorms I don't see it happening; I'm thinking of the dorm I lived in as a freshman/sophomore; it was two rooms, each with two roommates, both sharing a common bathroom. I don't see any way of modifying that building to split apart the rooms; you'd have to demolish it and start over, unless you just want to give everyone a double-size room. Dorm buildings (indeed all university buildings) are very expensive to build, which is why you see so many 50-100 year old buildings in state universities, so I'd only expect to see this with new construction. Heck, I remember reading over 10 years ago how many universities were making males and females share the same community bathrooms. This was because many dorm buildings, being old, were build with community bathrooms, where one whole floor shares the same big bathroom. But that was back in the days when most students were male; but now with demographics changing, many universities simply ran out of room to keep the two segregated, and I guess didn't have money to knock down the old dorms and build new ones, so they just kept the boys and girls in separate rooms, but made them share the same bathrooms (including showers).
My alma mater usually had two to a room, although one year I was in a larger room with three total (third guy was usually at his girlfriend's, so the extra space was nice. I'd imagine it's more efficient and is also meant to build character. I think the only people with single rooms were the resident assistants, basically upperclassmen who were den mothers to a given floor.
IIRC the average 2-bed room was 120 square feet, or a little over 11 square meters. How big are the rooms in your country?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
just in time for the semester to end and to take it all down. Sadly, that emergency party never did arrive.
He bought off the shelf X-10 controllers. He used off the shelf controller software.
Where's the innovation? The creativity? The uniqueness that makes this an engineering project instead of just an assembly of existing parts?
Back in University, some students in my hardware class wired up a Radio Shack sound generator chipset project. The prof spent 40 minutes tearing them a new arsehole because they did nothing more than wire-wrap a canned project. They didn't design, create, or innovate a single thing, which was the whole point of the semester-long project.
It strikes me that my prof would have given this fellow the same lecture.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
DISCLAIMER: I am the creator of the Industrial Controlled Alarm Clock............ http://endofnet.com/ICACP.html which was written up on hack a day http://hackaday.com/2007/05/02/industrial-alarm-clock/ way back in 2007......... this project was to wake my but up in the morning to control DMX Power, Sound and misc devices. while I was in the doom. It used an LED sign to convey the state of the alarm...... it did not need voice control it had 30mm NEMA buttons that light up :P
It did not need IPad and Iphone devices, I could ssh in to a box that was hooked up to it.
But this gives me ideas to work on revision 2.0, An Emergency Party Mode would be an cool feature to have with it.
-- Let Random be Random
If you get seriously sick in your room there is someone to 1. notice and 2. do something about it.
So that helps if you suddenly get so sick that you can't get out of the room, can't reach a phone and your room mate just happens to be in (and not e.g. attending a class). Should we enforce a policy where nobody can ever be alone anywhere just because they could possibly get sick?
Well, the system looks interesting; however, I'm more interested in the camera work a video editing. It seems, especially at the beginning, to have been professionally done. Is that the level of sophistication of today's modern video recorders and editing software, is this guy into video production or was there outside help? It seems a mismatch in skills as the hacking is fairly insignificant in comparison to the video skills.
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
Plenty of cases where schools have to pay out large claims due to accidents. Schools also check for carpentry projects like lofts and too many appliances, both which may be dangerous.
Without the roommate, you might go 24 hours or even a week without anyone realizing something is seriously wrong (friends might just assume you're busy or on a road trip). Chances are the roommate will be home within a few hours.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Lethality of electric shock depends on way, way too many factors to make blanket statements such as above. For example, according to wikipedia, for a large contact area and dry skin, 5% of the population has a hand-to-hand impedance of 1,200 Ohms. 110/1200 ~ 100 mA, which is significantly above the 60 mA threshold for a fatal shock to the heart. 50% of the population are just about at the threshold. Also, broken skin, sweaty skin, duration of contact, etc. are all factors. This is also why you should never break the ground pin off of an electrical plug. Case in point: a Cleveland State prof. died in 2006 after touching a lamp with a broken-off ground pin.
Closest we had to mixed-sex facilities was one dorm that'd been recently renovated. Each room had an en-suite 3/4 bath and while each room was single-sex, the floors were mixed. Other dorms on campus had sexes segregated by floors, and each floor had its own shared shower and toilet facilities.
It was interesting to see how different the dynamics were in the mixed-floor system. It was a lot quieter, for instance, and in general people seemed more respectful. That wasn't just because freshthings were banned from the building, though I'm sure it helped! Before that I'd been in another dorm on the single-sex floor system (still no freshthings) and it was still somewhat quiet but fun-rowdy at times, with the odd drunks coming in and causing trouble. The first dorm, which was largely filled with freshthings, was the worst - loud at all hours and drunks pulling the fire alarm a few times week during the night. The worst part was that this was advertised as a "quiet floor" for people who wanted to study, but they didn't get the whole floor filled up with those people and so they let ordinary freshthings in to fill it up. I'm told the situation prevailed the next year.
You wouldn't see mixed-sex shower/toilet rooms here; we're much too sexually repressed as a culture.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
You wouldn't see mixed-sex shower/toilet rooms here; we're much too sexually repressed as a culture.
You sound like an American. That's the thing: so am I, and the article I was referring to was talking about American universities having mixed-sex shower/toilet rooms, which is why I was rather shocked, as you're correct: we're very sexually repressed, so it's hard to imagine that here. But, I haven't been in a dorm building for almost 20 years, and different colleges and different dorms are different, so I can't say what's really going on anyway, just that I had read this article several years ago saying this was becoming commonplace in some colleges with old dorm buildings.
I guess things have changed a lot in the ~15 years since I was in dorms. I thought having a roommate was one of those things that was just part of the "college experience", to force you to get out of your shell. Then again, I had mostly negative experiences with my roommates as a freshman and sophomore before I stopped living in dorms, so the two shared bathroom and one shared kitchen and living room per four individual rooms plan actually sounds pretty nice to me.
I thought he was in California, not Colombia...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?