Year 8 Computer Studies – Creating a Connected Smart House

What is a Smart house

A smart house utilises the latest technologies combined with home networks to achieve four key
goals: convince, security, comfort and efficiency. Also referred to as a ‘connected home’ or ‘home
automation’ smart homes aim to simplify and automate both complex and simple tasks at the
convince of the user.

Your Task
There are two stages to this assessment task both are broken down below:

1. You will first need to create a floor plan for your house and it must meet the following
criteria:
 Use the Sweet Home 3D software to design the house
 Your house must follow the conventions of a regular house design
 Must include more than one room
 Must be single story
 Must not include a pool or other unnecessary features

2. Overlay a network map over your house floor plan

 Use Adobe Photoshop software to design your network map
 You must include all the components to create a LAN network that can access the
internet
 You must include smart home devices that are connected to your home network
 You must label each component of the network using the text tool

See the instructions for using Photoshop on page 2.

Submitting your work

You are required to submit your work via the Seqta assessment submissions your submissions
require you to upload the following:

 Your Sweet Home 3D save file

 Your finished Floor Plan with Network Map Overlay uploaded as a PNG
How to overlay your network map
Open Adobe Photoshop on your computer

Click create new and in the new window that pops up select print and choose the A4 page size

Select your desired orientation

Take a screenshot of your house floor plan using the PrtScn button
Paste your screenshot into Photoshop using Ctrl + V

Photoshop works in layers you can see the layer tab along the right hand column next you will need
to make sure you have the layer your screenshot is on select (should be layer 1 by default)
Select the rectangle marquee tool and drag and select around your floor plan, we are going to cut
your house to its own layer

With your house now selected we are going to right click and select > layer via cut
You can now select layer one and delete it (backspace key) after selecting it.

You can use the Eraser tool to erase any areas you were unable to crop out with marquee tool use
the [ and] keys to adjust the size of your eraser

Use Ctrl + T to resize an image and click and drag on the corner, press enter once you are happy with
the new size.
Now use google to find icon images, when you find a icon image you like use the Snipping tool to
create a copy of it, and then paste it into your document using Ctrl + V, next you can use Ctrl + T to
resize them, and the move tool (V) to move them.

Tip:

The lower down something is in the layer menu, the lower down it will be displayed in your project.
If something it appearing over something it shouldn’t try adjusting their position in the layer
hierarchy.

Right click the rectangle tool and select the line tool to draw the connection lines between your
components

Before you draw your lines, set the line Weight to 5

Finally, to add your text select the Horizontal Type Tool and click where you would like to enter text.
Use the move tool to click and move and of images / lines / text, you have added to your document.

Here is a basic example of some components of a network mapped onto a floor plan
Make sure to save your work to cloud documents so you can access it from any computer.
Once completed you network map need to export your final image click File>Export>Export as…

A window will pop up, ensure PNG is selected, click export then save it to your documents.