During my PhD I needed a test-bed office to conduct my research about user-interfaces for lighting control. I repurposed the Enlight system to an interactive smart office lighting system.
Opportunity
Refitting an existing student workspace with an interactive lighting system for studies and student projects.
Result
A fully working, highly customizable lighting system with 22 luminaires that can be tuned in intensity and colour temperature.
The luminaires
I used an older, decommissioning lighting system as developed by the Enlight project Each luminaire is fitted with an XBee radio and integrated logic and sensing (motion, light level, and temperature). The light output can vary in intensity (0 – 3800 lm) and colour temperature (1700 – 8000 K).
The system infrastructure
The system is developed using Processing, the final version is available on Github
This was an extensive project which evolved over time as my studies continued and new interfaces were connected. The main challenge for this project was to repurpose the existing system to my needs. To do so, I needed to learn the system architecture and how the system operates. As a next step, I needed to “hack” that system so that I would be able to connect my own custom user-interfaces to control the lighting in the office. To do so, I used the original Xbee coordinator node to communicate to the system, which was connected to my custom Processing sketch as an intelligent gateway between the custom user interfaces and the luminaires.
The office
The new lighting system was installed in the Mujiplayer space. The original tube-based luminaires were replaced and the false ceiling was reconfigured to fit the new LED luminaires.The Mujiplayer space has room for up to 28 people at four groups of tables. It is occupied daily by students of the TU/e and is used for a variety of activities ranging from individual work to teamwork, plenary presentations, and public exhibitions.
Result
22
Highly customizable lightpoints
26
Custom lighting interfaces were connected into the system
21
Projects and studies were performed in the lab
6
Publications featuring the light system
Publications and studies
The test-bed office was used for a variety of studies and for education purposes. Some published work featuring the lab include:
- Christel de Bakker, Mariëlle Aarts, Helianthe Kort, Evert van Loenen & Alexander Rosemann (2019) Preferred Luminance Distributions in Open-Plan Offices in Relation to Time of Day and Subjective Alertness, LEUKOS, DOI: 10.1080/15502724.2019.1587619
- den Ouden, E., Haans, A., Ross, P., van Essen, H., de Kort, Y., & Brankaert, R. (2019). 10 years living light labs: achievements and learnings of researching intelligent lighting solutions in living labs at the TU/e Intelligent Lighting Institute. Eindhoven: Technische Universiteit Eindhoven.
- Karin Niemantsverdriet, Thomas van de Werff, Harm van Essen, and Berry Eggen. 2018. Share and Share Alike? Social Information and Interaction Style in Coordination of Shared Use. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – CHI ’18, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173877
- Christel de Bakker, Mariëlle Aarts, Helianthe Kort & Alexander Rosemann (2019) Local Lighting Control in Open-Plan Offices: The Influence of Office Lay-Out. Proceedings of the 20th Congress of the International Ergonomics Association (IEA 2018). IEA 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 827. Springer, Cham
- Thomas van de Werff, Karin Niemantsverdriet, Harm van Essen, and Berry Eggen. 2017. Evaluating Interface Characteristics for Shared Lighting Systems in the Office Environment. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems – DIS ’17, 209–220. https://doi.org/10.1145/3064663.3064749
