Wireless Thermostat

The thermostat in [Tom’s] 100-year-old house is two floors up from where the furnace is located, so a broken wire in the wall was just the catalyst needed to design a wireless thermostat. The system is based on a customized PCB [Tom] designed called the Magic Mote. The board contains an MSP430 microcontroller,...

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Hacking a Heating Pad

[Bob] and his wife use a bed heating pad. In the winter, they typically turn it on about an hour before bedtime so the bed is nice and warm. The problem is, if they accidentally leave it on, they’ll wake up a few hours later: overheated. What they needed was an advanced timer system. A normal outlet timer...

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A New Way to Heat People

[Leigh Christie] is a researcher at MIT, and he’s developed an interesting solution to heating people, not buildings. His TEDx talk, “Heating Buildings is Stupid,” demonstrates the MIT SENSEable City Laboratory’s efforts to tackle energy issues. Their research focuses on finding an alternative to the staggering...

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