Abstract:
Energy efficiency has risen up to be the predominant factor in the design of embedded and mobile hardware in the last decade. Energy management is now a key issue in the design and development of warehouse size machine rooms. Extensive finite element models are deployed to understand hot spots and devise cooling solutions in the machine rooms, often solving complicated set of PDEs using CFD techniques. Simultaneously, there is a growing trend in obtaining real-time temperature and humidity parameters by deploying several sensors. In this talk I will motivate the need for a holistic view of several physical parameters of the machine room beyond the common temperature, humidity and airflow parameters. I will describe our efforts in the design and implementation of a sensing envelope using open-source embedded hardware toolkits including Arduino and Gumstix. Next, I will briefly describe the design decisions involved in the realization of the envelope and discuss the embedded communication and networking mechanisms. Following some visuals of the physical parameters we have collected using the system in the form of color-maps and graphs, I will conclude the talk presenting some of our ideas on the physical representation and manipulation of the collected parameters.

Short Biography:
Rajesh Sankaran is a PhD candidate in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. He is a member of the Tangible Visualization group at the Center for Computation & Technology. Rajesh is co-advised by Dr. Brygg Ullmer & Dr. J (Ram) Ramanujam, and his research interests are in Embedded Systems and their applications in HCI. He is currently working on a modular, scalable, re-usable, and flexible hardware platform called Blades & Tiles as part of his PhD thesis. Rajesh maintains Cyber presence at http://www.cct.lsu.edu/~rajesh/ .