Smart Cities Tiny House Course script

Lesson 1 - Introduction

Welcome and Happy to see you attending this Smart Cities and Tiny House course. Our goal is to build most of the components of a Tiny House and to show you how each element makes your Tiny House more Sustainable.

We will show you why a Tiny house is much more sustainable than a larger house. Rather than just talking about all these concepts we though it would be better to get hands dirty and actually build an example of a Tiny house. Perhaps a Tiny house 3 metres by 3 metres in floor space.

Everything in this course has been carefully designed to be buildable and practical. Yes - at the end of this course you will probably have all the knowledge and skills to build your own Tiny house with all the comforts of a modern house.

Some of the key components in the Tiny house will be a:

• A low-cost computer built using electronic waste
• Build a Smart rainwater tank and monitor our water usage
• Solar PV system with battery
• Insulation that goes into the tiny house and sealing up the house to make it air tight
• An air heat exchanger for the tiny house so you can get fresh air but not waste energy to the outer environment
• A solar hot water system for showers
• A composting toilet so that we can collect and reuse nutrients in the garden
• Showcasing low energy appliances such as an e-bike as a form of sustainable transport and a portable refrigerator.
• Information sharing platforms (without advertisements and tracking cookies)

All these components are easy to build and hopefully your school or local businesses will help you to buy or donate the things you need for your projects.

And if you can't build the different components don't worry. We will be using sensors to collect data from every project that we do so that you can access the data on the internet.

The whole course is available as a series of educational videos. In each lesson we will take you through the following learning stages.

• What is the question we are going to answer
• The environmental issue we are trying to solve
• Basic theory on the current subject
• Then we enter the build phase (the fun part)
• Often our projects will require a sensor (for example - a temperature sensor if we are testing the properties of insulation)
• Our low-cost computer will be used to collect and analyse the sensor data
• Testing our new innovation under real world conditions to see if it really does work.

Don't worry if you have never coded a computer or even built something before. All the videos assume no prior knowledge and break big tasks into small and simple steps.

We will also create some additional lessons for some projects that are nice to know about, but not essential to the course program.

If you have any ideas please let us know. We would be happy to include them so that others can learn from your experience.

We have been working with low cost computers, sensors to educate young people about sustainability for about 10 years. There is no time to lose in changing our habits. The Earth has a limited carbon budget that is rapidly running out.

This course is offered for free and the course content will also be available to anyone via downloads and on a mediawiki site similar to Wikipedia. All information will be available as Creative Commons licenses which allows anyone to copy the content and distribute it for free.

Once your finish this course at school the best thing you can do is to build something similar and even take some of the learning home. I'm sure after finishing this course you will be able to see lots of opportunities to improve the sustainability of your own home. That will make the entire team here happy.

So that's it for this video. I hope to see you soon as we take our first big steps towards building a Tiny house.

Lesson 2 - Why a Tiny House ?

In this video we are going to talk about Tiny Houses. Why do we need them and what shapes and sizes they come in.

Regular Houses

Most of us live in a regular house. But the size and the sustainability of houses varies a lot between different countries.

In Australia we have some of the largest houses in the world. Not only are the houses large but each house has one or two cars, a road out the front, pipes underground to deliver water, gas, even electricity and the internet, and to take away wastes from our toilets, showers and sinks.

When built a typical house has already released 90 tonnes of carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide comes from the steel, concrete and other material that go into building the house.

Spare a thought for the animals and plants that once lived on the site before the house was built. They all had to find other places to live. We made them homeless, so to speak.

In modern cities houses sprawl as far as the eye can see. Black roofs and black bitumen make our cities hotter in the summer. Those same hard surfaces cause rainwater to rush into stormwater pipes and empty into rivers and streams. Imagine being a platypus or fish. When it rains house house floods and litter and garbage contaminate your once clean environment.

Indigenous Houses

Before Europeans arrived in Australia houses were more modest.

Houses were built using local materials such as stone, wood, bark, sticks and even the hides from animals. They were small and used mainly for cooking and sleeping. Some tiny houses were also used to store grain. They didn't have as many material things and of course there were no cars.

Human wastes, which are full of good nutrients for the soil, were buried in the ground. Other food wastes were either buried, burnt in camp fires or left for native animals to forage. Some waste are still seen today as large piles of shells called middens.

The overall impact on the environment was minimal and hence very sustainable.

Luckily today there is a growing awareness of the impact of housing. And as housing becomes more expensive and the cost of energy increases some people have been exploring smaller versions of conventional houses and that how Tiny Houses became more popular and really caught the attention of lots of people.

In fact, to solve problems associated with Climate Change, waste, plastic pollution in our oceans we will need to start building Tiny Houses.

Existing houses can remain, but perhaps certain aspects of the regular house may need to change to make them more like a Tiny house, even if this is only applied to a single room in the house such as adding more insulation.

Minitopia

There is a Tiny House project in The Netherlands called Minitopia.

The site is an old landfill. Council owns the land and because the ground is unstable only tiny houses can be built on the site.

Each house receives electricity, water and sewage. For warmth in winter the Tiny houses use small wood fire stoves.

Each resident needs to build their own house and of course there are many people in the community willing to give a hand.

The cost of the Tiny house varies between 5,000 and $17,000 Euro. In 2019 there were 33 houses on the site.

The opportunity to build a Tiny house at Minitopia follows an interview process. The aim is to encourage diversity, so there are young people, old people, new migrants. Everyone understands that to make this work they all need to follow rules, respect each other and try to resolve differences quickly and amicably.

This project serves as a great role model.

Modern Tiny Houses

In this course we will do things a little different and take advantage of some modern technology.

Rather than having a wood heater we will try to use insulation and air heat exchangers to keep our Tiny house warm in winter.

Tiny houses can also stay cooler in summer if they are shaded using vegetation and have thermal mass such as concrete, bricks and water inside the house.

In Minitopia, electrical power came from the conventional electrical grid, however solar PV panels and batteries can easily produce and store enough electricity for most low-energy appliances.

If you capture water from the roof and plant a garden around a house you can grow some of your own food. In this course we will use large rainwater tanks to capture rainwater and use this water in the garden. To feed our garden we will need to recycle our own wastes in compost bins and food waste can be fed to chicken and rabbits.

Most Tiny house communities end up building many separate shelters to serve as kitchen and meal areas, outdoor toilets, workshops, sheds and meeting spaces. These small shelters do not need to be well insulated. They also mean that the main Tiny house will not be cluttered.

When finished the Tiny house may only have some beds for sleeping and study, with perhaps a simple bathroom area.

This already sounds vastly different from what you have now, but remember, actually most of the world live in habitats similar to this.

Lesson 3 - Building a computer from electronic-waste

In the previous video we learned about Tiny Houses are why they are important for the environment.

Tiny Raspberry Pi Computer

As we embark on our journey of building a Tiny House we will need to make use of a very useful computer called a Raspberry Pi. A Raspberry Pi is a small computer that you can buy for a few tens of dollars, euros or pounds.

You build it up into a full computer by simply adding a monitor, keyboard and mouse which you can get second hand. A small 5V supply provides power for the Raspberry Pi and a micro SD card is all the digital storage it needs.

The operating system and all the software are free.

This little computer was designed to help young people learn more about computers. The computer is robust and easy to fix if anything goes wrong, and has all the productivity software, such as email, web browsers and word processors, that are normally found on more expensive computers.

Electronic Waste

This little computer will help reduce the production of electronic-waste or e-waste for short. By re-using old computer hardware such as monitors, keyboards and mice we divert them from landfill and give them a second life. Lots of computer hardware is thrown away simply because a new computer has been bought. This seems to be an incredible waste.

You may think that computers can be easily recycled. The truth is that they contain many toxic metals, chemicals added as flame retardants, and plastics. Old computer hardware is often sent to developing countries where poor workers scavenge more valuable components and throw away the remaining components. This leads to the poisoning of the soil and water.

Long life computers

Have you ever had a laptop that kept on getting slower and slower so that you could barely use it. It is possible to install the same Operating System used on the Raspberry Pi computer on an older laptop and bring it back to almost new. The Operating System used on the Raspberry Pi is called Linux and operates very fast even on old computers.

You will also be able to monitor the temperature of the computer brain or CPU. CPU is short for Central Processing Unit. Keeping the temperature of the CPU at around 30-40 degrees Centigrade will help prolong the life of any computer. Linux is designed to be kind to your computer by not working it too hard.

In this lesson we will show you how to assemble your Raspberry Pi computer and how to install the Operating System and complete some basic configuration.

Lesson 4 - Build a People Smart Rainwater Tank

In our last lesson we learnt how to get our little Raspberry Pi computer up and running.

In this lesson we will start to use this computer to help monitor a rainwater tank attached to a house in Melbourne, Australia.

The tank is called a Smart Tank because it has a sensor placed inside the tank that can measure the amount or height of water in the tank. The sensor, which sits on the bottom of the tank, measures water pressure and can then calculate the height of water above the sensor in the tank.

If we know the dimensions of the rainwater tank we can easily calculate the tank volume and the volume of water in the tank.

Most tank connected to houses have a volume of 2,000 to 10,000 litres. People who love gardening or who live in the country can have even bigger tanks, especially if they don't have tap water.

Activity to collect water level data using Raspberry Pi

In this lesson we will use the Raspberry Pi computer to monitor the water level in a real rainwater tank connected to a house.

Open the web browser on the Raspberry Pi.

In the Search Bar copy the following URL address and paste it and press the Enter key.

You may need to wait for 10 seconds for the results to show up.

This statement looks like an address on the internet or World Wide Web (www). In fact it is. It is the address of our water sensor. We can break down the address further.

Similar to our home address which has a street address, then suburb or town, then city, region and country - web addresses for sensors have a way to identify the location of the sensor on the internet.

• app.alphax.cloud - is the location of a computer server on the internet
• id=F008D1D0968C - is the serial number of the sensor registered to this computer server
• token=5ecf2e35d99a404a81408792 - the token is a security code to prevent anyone contacting the server at random (e.g. bots)

https://app.alphax.cloud/conduitv6?id=F008D1D0968C&token=5ecf2e35d99a404a81408792&limit=1&ch=1

The results in the browser look confusing, but to computers this will make perfect sense. Computers can easily pull data out because the data is presented in JSON format. JSON formatting has curly brackets at the beginning and end.

To make the data more human readable, highlight and copy the data. Open the link below and paste the data in the first window and click on the format button.

https://jsonviewer.com/

Instantly you should see something like this. Much easier to read and you can start deciphering different pieces of data. At the very end is the depth of the sensor. In this case 0.758 metres.

The data is arranged in a dictionary format. Is has at attribute on the left, and a value on the right. For a computer to extract the depth of the sensor all it needs to do is look for the attribute val_calibrated

At the very top of the data set is an attribute called val_date. This is the time that the sensor last communicated with the server to send data.

The numbers contain both date and time information. It is stored in a format called Unix epoch time. Again, this date can be easily read by computers.

For humans to read it we have to convert Epoch time to Human readable time.

The following address will do that for us.

https://epochconverter.com/