Design Phase II

During this week's meeting our group established some more guidelines for our design project as well as various other details of the overall Dorm Energy Competition.

Choosing a Dorm:

During this week's meeting we established that the competition would most likely take place between two dorms instead of by floor. We also decided that the freshman towers provided the best competition grounds for a few reasons:

1. All the floors are even. One of the main reasons Frear was abandoned as a competition dorm was the fact that the floors are uneven. By this I mean that some floors have a laundry room, some floors have a study lounge each of which consumes various amounts of energy and gives floors unfair advantages over other floors.

2. Fulfills one of the goals for the competition. One of the goals is to raise awareness about energy conservation as early as possible. By using the freshman dorms as a competition we are able to reach students at the earliest possible stage and hopefully raise awareness that will stick with them throughout their academic careers and beyond.

Other Guidelines:

We also determined that we should have weekly floor leaders in order to promote healthy competition among the students on the floor. Ideally we would like to have lcd screen in the dorm lobby displaying such stats as the current dorm energy usage, the past week floor leader as well as various other data about the floors and their energy consumption. Additionally we reviewed the 3 main goals (which can be found here) of the competition and adjusted our guidelines as well as the way we educate the students in order to meet the 3 goals.

Kukui Design

For the first quarter of software engineering II I have been assigned to the Kukui design team. We are in charge of providing the interface for the user to be able to view specified energy related data and adjust their consumption accordingly.

Ideas:

As stated in class there should be some sort of chart (I think that a bar graph would do the job well) that displays the real time energy data with a 10 second delay. Also at this stage it might be impossible for us to measure personal consumption so maybe a more realistic goal might be to have a chart that displays the user's room energy consumption. Additionally I think that all of the data for all the dorms should be displayed on the login page. This would allow users to see how their dorms stand in comparison to the other dorms in the competition. Lastly I think that there should be some widget type box that displays the daily/monthly values (such as the cost of the energy consumption thus far, the amount CO2 that was emitted and what percentage of the dorm's total energy usage and CO2 emissions that the user has contributed).