Environmental temperature of equatorial countries are very high. Therefore people tend to use an air conditioner as a solution, but it is not practical to buy an A/C in a third world developing country like Sri Lanka. The price of an air conditioner is very high and the maintenance cost of such machines are too high. So the next best solution for this problem is using a fan but there are many difficulties and problems in a normal fan too.

Therefore an undergraduate student team in Sri Lanka have being trying to identify what the difficulties are and what more people expect  from a fan.  They have proposed an “Automated Smart Fan” which overcomes many difficulties faced by users and which meet user expectations.

This Automated Smart Fan is name as “Smarty” and they have used latest technologies to develop this automated smart fan. The smarty can be easily operated by your smart phone and it consists with 4 modes such as

• Normal Mode
• Automatic Mode
• Schedule Mode
• Security Mode

Each mode consists with specific features.

Normal mode, the default mode in the fan is where the user is allowed to remotely control the fan with the help of the Android application. With the Android application, user is able to connect to the fan with the help of Bluetooth and change the speed of the fan, adjust the rotation, switch the fan on and off and set a mode on the fan.

In Automatic mode the Fan is used to operate only when human is detected and off when there is no presence. It operates by identifying current room temperature and change its speed according to the changing room temperature. Another special feature in Smarty is that it  rotates only to the direction of the human. If there are two people presence it rotates only covering those two people. The specialty of this mode is, it detects only the humans and not any object movements or animals, because it detects human using image processing and not by using any sensors.

Schedule Mode is another important feature existing in this fan. This mode is very helpful at night time when the user can easily schedule the fan. For an example, the user can schedule the fan before sleeping according to his comfort needs. The user can set the fan’s speed to low from midnight till 3:00 a.m. and from 3:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m., the fan will rotate and change the speed to high. And at 5:00 a.m., it will switch off.

In Security mode when the user goes outside of the house, leaving the fan in security mode, if there is any intruder detected, it will send notification to the user’s smart phone including the image of the intruder. At the same time live video of the room will be saved.

Smarty is designed not only for normal people but also for differently abled people. The team have being designing separate mobile applications for disabled people which can be operated using voice recognition. This also is very much helpful for small kids too.

To develop this fan they have used raspberry pi, micro controller in order to control the fan, raspberry pi camera to capture images and servo motor to handle the rotation of the fan. And they have designed the controller board with other electronic items.

The team hopes to develop Smarty furthermore and expand this for the concept of smart home.

So we appreciate their effort and wish the team to innovate more things to the world.