The theme of the second module was Smart Environments. A smart environment is an environment, like an office room or bed room where there are autonomous functions carried out by a system that is hidden from the viewer and can deal with new situations it wasn't programmed to handle. We had decided to take the environment of a bedroom in the Netherlands during winter. To save on energy, the heater would only switch on and off every time the user walk over the doorstep of his or her house. Our system consisted of an Arduino, a servo, an LED that represented the room light and a radio. The idea of the project was to place switches under the carpeting that the user would step on as he or she made his or her way into the bedroom. We liked the idea of having the switches under the floor as it meant the user couldn’t see any switches or sensors sticking out of the floor or ceiling. When the user entered the room, the first switch they stepped on activated the room lights. The second switch activated the radio in our demonstration but in our design would activate the sound system favoured by the user and being playing their favorite playlist. In our design the first switch was located under the carpet near the front door and the light and radio switches were located under the carpet near the bedroom door.

For our prototype, an LED represented the room lights, the servo (an motor) rotated 180 degrees mimicking the heater knob being rotated every time someone stepped through the main door and the radio was switched on every time a user took a second step into the room.

A lot of the people who tried out our system mentioned how fluidly it worked, and how convenient it was that the switches were under the carpet instead of on the walls where they would need to be manually activated.