Dorm Energy Simulator: Week 2

In order for a simulation for a dorm's power usage to be realistic, it is important to have a clear idea of what types of appliances a typical dorm room would have and the power that these devices use under different uses. The best way to create a realistic spreadsheet of usage data would be to find the periods where students are in their dorms and using the most energy. Then we could simulate "turning on" and "turning off" different devices which would give us data that would resemble what real power usage in a dorm would be like. Incorporating this knowledge with a realistic algorithm for energy use during different times of the day and different days of the week will give us good data which can be very useful to see if different projects are working correctly with reasonable information.

This is a wiki page which contains a chart of different devices and their power usage in standby, average load, max load, and when turned off. This page will be updated with new appliances and more data as it becomes available.



The wiki page can be reached by clicking here.

Dorm Energy Simulator: Week 1

This is the first week in the 3rd milestone. I am now working in the team which will create a program to simulate data for energy usage in the dorms. The simulation will be able to produce data depending which devices are used by the residents at different times during the day.

One very important thing that we needed to get cleared out of the way was the terms that we would need to use during our development of this project. These terms include power (the present flow of watts), energy (power over time), and demand (average rate of energy use over time). This is very important as we proceed so that we have a consistent understanding and implementation throughout our program.

We have not met yet to discuss how we will break up the work, but I will be doing research into the devices that would typically be found in a dorm room and finding the energy use while they are on/off. I will also be looking into their current program which sends data.

Kukui Cup Competition Design: Milestone 2

For this second milestone, we change our method to focusing on a different time period each week. This allowed us to place our minds in a certain mindset so we could make choices in our design that would more closely match those of the users. We used the first week to do the mockups for the period before the competition, the second week for the period right after the competition started, the third week for billboard pages, and the last week to fix up our older mockups and give them a consistent look.

This week i changed up my previous mockups to make them look consistent with the other pages for the site. I also created the wiki for all of the billboard mockups.



This is the basic help page with competition information and contact info.



This is the billboard page before the competition begins. It gives what a student would probably like to know about the competition like the prizes and how the winners are determined.




These are a couple pages which will be displayed when the competition is going on. The idea is to give the students quick and easy ways for them to improve their energy usage.

Kukui Cup Competition Design: Week 7

This week, I focused on creating mockups for the billboard. The billboard will be scrolling through different pages at an interval somewhere between 5 and 10 seconds. They will show some interesting information to the students and give them updates on the competition. The first five mockups I created just gave some helpful information to the students which could help them reduce their energy usage. The one after that shows the prizes they can win, which is probably the biggest motivator for the students. The last page I created shows the current energy percentage savings in the dorm along with a dollar equivalent so they can more easily relate to the numbers.