Adopting Building Automation in Weblabs - Analysis of Requirements and Solutions

Several companies have been developing domotic Stds. for building automation, enabling users to locally and remotely control several home devices, like: lights, power sockets, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems, among others. Besides contributing to improve the building comfort, these Stds. may also be adopted for other purposes, namely in weblabs used in sciences and engineering remote experiments. To increase the sense of immersion in weblabs, we identify domotic Stds. as a standard solution for turning on/off the power infrastructure and controlling the light and temperature conditions of the physical space where a specific experiment may run, thus approaching the sense of being in the lab facilities while accessing them through the corresponding weblab interface. After identifying the added value to weblabs in terms of power savings and in the control of the environmental conditions, it is presented a proof-of-concept (implemented with an adopted domotic system bus), which enables the control of an halogen lamp and a power socket, using a specific Web interface.