Lighting Research and Technology vol 40 nr 3 has a couple of articles that sound interesting for anyone involved in visual comfort. Proportions of direct and indirect indoor lighting — The effect on health, well-being and cognitive performance of office workers, by KI Fostervold and J. Nersveen. Indirect lighting has been recommended as a way […]
One article in the last issue of Energy and Buildings is of particular relevance to the field of home automation, particularly where daylight control is involved: Simplified correlations of global, direct and diffuse luminous efficacy on horizontal and vertical surfaces, by A. De Rosaa, V. Ferraroa, D. Kaliakatsosa and V. Marinelli. A simple calculation method […]
There’s a great discussion on StackOverflow going on, when someone asked for suggestions for a low power, low cost and high availability linux box. Exactly the kind of hardware we need for home automation.
Two articles from new new issue of Building Simulation sound particularly interesting: Comparing computer run time of building simulation programs, by Tianzhen Hong, Fred Buhl, Philip Haves, Stephen Selkowitz and Michael Wetter. This paper presents an approach for comparing the computer run time of building simulation programs. The computing run time of a simulation program […]
I have released version 0.2 of the Java GNU Scientific Library (JGSL) project, its second public alpha release. Please visit the JGSL project website for more information. This second release provides additional wrapper classes for the GSL stats module (mean, variance, standard deviation, etc.). Feel free to try it out and get back to me […]
More papers directly relevant to the main topic of this blog: Monitoring and modelling of manually-controlled Venetian blinds in private offices: a pilot study by Vorapat Inkarojrit This study presents results from a window blind usage survey and field study that was conducted in California, USA during a period spanning from the vernal equinox to […]
The following papers from Building and Environment Volume 43, Issue 12, December 2008 are relevant to the field of building automation and simulation. Photometry and colorimetry characterisation of materials in daylighting evaluation tools by M. Bodart, R. de Penaranda, A. Deneyer, G. Flamant. This paper presents a methodology for evaluating the photometric and colorimetric characteristics […]
Four people again attended this second meeting, the purpose of which is to share information among people interested in home and building automation. As previously, here are photos of the group’s collective memory along with my comments. Fred told us first about a conference he had attended, organized and hosted by the Demontfort University in […]
A fun online article in the New York Times discusses the current public perception of smart houses. The gist of the article was that home automation is, despite appearances, something perfectly obtainable provided someone pays for it. And you no longer have to be either filthy rich or a geek to obtain it. There are […]
I have just come across a short but interesting interview with H. Michael Newman, the “Father” of BACnet. The interview can be downloaded from here. Two points in particular caught my interest. One is that according to Newman, as far as standards go, BACnet is an EN standard and thus BACnet is now the “law […]