Final Interface Layout

Just posting here for webspace because im too lazy to upload to mine.

Installation

Here is a collection of pictures from my installation and how people interacted and reacted to the piece.

FSR Sensor

Doug kindly let me use an FSR sensor, they're freakin sweet. Heres a pic of how it will be enclosed around the elevator down button. This whole thing will be over it so you have to press the sensor if you want the elevator to come up.



Although I'm having problems getting values stable enough into Max. Going to try out some different resistors and capacitors into the arduino to see if it can stabilize it somewhat.

Also here is a new layout picture of how I want to put this all together.

Max Patch

I initially developed my concept in Quartz. I had a bit of trouble using the Arduino with Quartz, so I remade the whole patch in MaxMSP, which took alot longer than I thought it would. The actual patch looks a hell of alot simpler than it really is.



So what this patch does, is everytime a bang is sent to my Uzi object, a number is brought up using the jit.lcd function. It also goes fullscreen!


So the number in the middle rises, as my IR beam, or pressure pad, gets broken or touched.

Mishaps

Ok, so I built up the IR Sensor kit from Jay Car. It worked for about 20mins then decided to die on me after I had just got it working with Maxuino.




So I tried an IR sensor light from Bunnings. This ended up only working at the distance of about 20cm, the box said 20feet.

Decided I would buy a wireless infra red sensor door chime/alarm. Took it apart and wired it up, and it decided that it would die on me.


My conscience was trying to tell me something I think, IR would not work for this project no matter what I did. I'm going to keep trying these things out because I really want to use a sightless beam to track people and make the project as subtle as possible.

Information Regarding Elevator Power Usage

How much electricity is used per round trip, per floor and per km?

Per round trip (20 floors): 100 Wh. This is about how much a desktop computer and monitor use running for 30 minutes.

Per floor (one direction, 3 meters): 2.5 Wh. That is approximately 1/2 the amount of energy it takes to recharge a cellphone battery.

Per km: 800 Wh. To put this in perspective, the Tesla Roadster electric uses 110 Wh per km. A counter weighted elevator is therefore about 1/7 as efficient as the Tesla Roadster per km. Then again the elevator goes up and down while the Roadster travels on flat land.

3) Does reducing your use of elevator trips make sense?

For health reasons, probably. Walking up a couple of flights of stairs a day is good excerise and your heart will be happy with you. But in terms of reducing energy usage for environmental reasons, not really. There are many other things that are much easier to do that would have bigger impacts. Changing 3 100 W light bulbs to CFLs would save more electricity than the typical apartment dweller going cold turkey on elevators.

If you were to walk up and down 3 flights of stairs instead of an elevator, that would save 15 Wh a day or 450 Wh a month. That would be enough to power a 37" Plasma TV for 3 hours. It is something, but not much. If you wanted to save energy, you would be better off trying to walk or take public transportation to work.

If living in a high rise in a dense urban environment allows you to save more than 1 gallon of gasoline due to decreased driving, the elevator usage more than pays for itself in energy savings.

After all this analysis, I am left with the same thought that I had when I started this, elevators don't use much energy and that Long Emergency guy is seriously bonkers.


Calculations

Data was gathered from the Otis Elevator Energy Use Calculator. They use the following assumptions:

1) Residential Building:

- Each user performs 2 runs per day (up and down);

- Each run, as a rule, corresponds to half of the elevator's total rise;

- Each floor, as a rule, is 3 m. hig

- In part of the runs, the elevator does not spend energy

As I understand it, each run is an up and down so this means there are 4 single leg journeys a day. I believe this assumes that you are the only person in the elevator each time you take it. This might over estimate the total as sometimes you share a ride. On the other hand, sometimes you are on the ground floor and the elevator has to travel many floors to get to you, so this would under-estimate the total. Hopefully they more or less cancel each other out.

Information gathered from: http://fatknowledge.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-much-energy-does-elevator-use.html

Picture of Style for Pro1