What is it?
IntelliTrack is a set of intelligent lamps that can be configured and positioned without touching them. The movements of the lamps are based on simple physical simulations, which give them a playful personality.
Who is it for?
Designed for small spaces (e.g. student housing, single-room apartments), where one room acts as a living room, bedroom and an office. Inspired by some of IKEA’s ingenious solutions, we designed the lamps to be placed to take up minimum space, functioning as both practical work-lamps and discrete mood lighting.
Why is it valuable?
These lamps facilitate a range of appropriate lighting situations to change the room from an office space to a relaxing living room, without having different lamps for each setting. Optimising space is important in a small home, and as these lamps do not require direct physical contact to adjust them, they can be placed where they are normally unreachable.
Controllable lamps already exist, but are usually part of a complicated and expensive home automation system, controlled via a touch-screen mounted in a wall. The IntelliTrack lighting system allows complete control over the direction of the lamp via simple wireless device. This enables dimming as well as on & off. The system is based on widely used and produced hardware from game consoles and hobby electronics, making them inexpensive to produce compared to regular home automation systems.
How does it work?
The tracking system in the lamps is based on the infrared light camera feature of the Nintendo Wii Remote. The lamps look for a special infrared light source, located in the wireless control device – and when they see it, they follow it. If the light source is invisible, they respond to the movement of the remote control instead, meaning that if the lamp is placed in a way that makes it impossible for the camera to optically see the control device.
The lamps are equipped with two servomotors and a dimming circuit for the lightsource, all controlled by an Arduino Mini which is communicating wirelessly with a base station via Xbee modules. The infrared camera has a separate Bluetooth connection to the base station. The control device is a modified Nintendo Wii Remote, which (with help from an Arduino Pro Mini) reads the dimming dials and sends this data along with accelerometer data back to the base station via Bluetooth.
What were your key learnings?
This project has provided us with a lot of new knowledge, especially in terms of designing and laying out objects for lasercutting, which has been a central part of the physical prototyping. The electronics aspect of the project has introduced us to the field of C# programming, wireless communication standards and the I2C bus. The latter gives us the possibility of eliminating of the base station and Wii Remotes. The use of rapid video prototyping early on in the process helped us communicate our direction to our peers and mentors giving us valuable feedback. All of this, combined with strong ideas on how to spend and manage the 4 weeks of development, have helped maximise the overall learning experience.
Special thanks to: Vinay Venkatraman, David Mellis and David Cuartielles for help with the electronics, as well as Heather Martin, Alexander Wiethoff and Christopher Scales for their help with the conceptual side of the project.
