LumenHAUS is the third solar house designed and built at Virginia Tech as part of a research program begun in 2002. An innovative design integrating architecture and technology, the project won the international Solar Decathlon Competition in Madrid, Spain in June of 2010. In January 2012 the LumenHAUS has won an AIA Honor Award for Architecture. This is the first time this award has been given to a university team.

As part of the LumenHAUS team, I was responsible for the design and implementation of an iPad application that could control certain aspects of the house and provide access to the sensor data available from the house. This involved close collaboration with a graphics designer in the design and layout of the different control screens while maintaining the LumenHAUS brand for the app. A sample of the wireframes developed during the design are shown below.

The app communicated with a server component through a socket connection, reading and writing the configuration state of the various house controls through a SAX XML parser. Screenshots of the finished app are highlighted below.