Challenge
Turn a motorized smart vent into a room thermostat, without a room temperature sensor.
Approach
We instrumented a test home with 100+ sensors across eight zones, measuring temperature, pressure, humidity, airflow, ambient light, presence and power. Flow hoods, anemometers, thermal cameras and current clamps verified ACCA, ANSI and ASHRAE load and flow calculations. From that data we built a thermodynamic model, an algorithm that estimates room temperature from duct temperature, and a distributed control system that stabilizes zones with the vents. Server-side machine learning processes control requests from many rooms at once, behind a virtual-thermostat mobile UI. API integrations reach major thermostat, ceiling-fan, smart-hub and energy-monitoring platforms.
Highlights
- A patented algorithm calculates remaining air-filter life from flow odometry instead of runtime estimates.
- Server latency cut 75% with memoization; device battery life up 20% through hardware-in-the-loop kinematics modeling.
- An interactive booth at a major consumer-electronics show demonstrated compatibility with a major smart-thermostat platform.