Our five categories:

energyEfficiency - makes The Home Depot Smart Home environmentally responsible.  The Home Depot Smart Home uses less energy, less water, and produces less waste than a traditional home.

safetyHealth - With one of the nation’s finest Biomedical Engineering Programs and hospitals, The Home Depot Smart Home joins health care with the way people live their daily lives.

autoAutomation - what puts the “Smart” in The Home Depot Smart Home.  Intelligent systems help the house run with less human intervention.

entEntertainment -The Home Depot Smart Home has a dedicated media lab to create a totally immersive, state of the art media experience.

cool
Cool Factor - projects focus on technical challenges too irresistible for an engineer to ignore.

 

automation Projects

Adaptive Digital Signal Processing - Active Noise Filtering [project page]

Adapts to a room environment and uses the LMS algorithm to filter out unwanted background noise at known frequencies, which often interfere with voice-activated commands given to the home automation system.

Home Automation [project page]

The Home Depot Smart Home’s planned home automation system will include the ability to remotely command by voice, devices such as lights, home theater, a centralized music library, and temperature control, in addition to providing a system for monitoring power and household events and managing security concerns.

Integrated Systems [project page]

Automation and building-wide control within a building such as The Home Depot Smart Home requires several specific criteria be met, such as reliability, flexibility, ease of integration, and functionality. In order to meet the requirements of The Home Depot Smart Home, a decentralized system using Echelon’s LonWorks network was chosen and a prototype developed.

Sensor Platform [project page]

Monitoring and reporting is central to The Home Depot Smart Home. The sensors that drive this process must be placed on an extensible and comprehensive network that can report readings from multiple sensor types and provide relevant data to all other systems for processing. Interconnectivity is vital in order to implement a decentralized network where devices can talk to each other and share information. Flexibility is also vital to The Home Depot Smart Home for research purposes. Logging takes place as 1-wire data is imported into an SQL database, and PHP web-based reports can be generated to alert occupants based on pre-set alarm levels.

Microphone Arrays [project page]

In collaboration with MERL labs, a large-scale network of microphones will be integrated throughout the house, walls, and ducts in an attempt to use low cost acoustic sensors to recreate 3-D environments. Acoustic monitoring will additionally be used for voice recognition, mechanical failure diagnostics, and noise cancellation research.