Change the Planet Contest:
1. This project is important to me because it is about changing the world and saving energy a little bit at a time using proven data. The easiest way to change our energy needs is to track them and cut out as much waste as possible, whenever we can afford to. The idea for this project is to be a baseline at showing how far IoT processing has come and how much it can change if applied correctly. Currently only 15% of homes in America have a smart thermostat equipped, meaning a whopping 85% of homes have little to no tracking of their temperature and adding up to a lot of wasted energy. This kit can help prove itself by adapting to any home or large building and not only track but analyze the usage of A/C and heating. This can help anyone who wants to not only save money, but also save the earth. But we didn't want this project to stop here, we also wanted it to be versatile enough to perform data collection outside. The usefulness of this is to be able to make short term predictions on weather, which if used in conjunction with a indoor sensors, will allow for smart control of any building using interior and exterior data.
2. If selected for this competition the kit we'd like to use is the CY8CKIT-062-WIFI-BT, as it has the TFT screen board which would be extremely useful for displaying UI and analytics directly on the device. The first main goal would be to display current data and then have it give a rough prediction for what the weather could be like in 1-3 hours.
3. Whenever we collect data we will be sending it to a database through AWS to parse through. The idea is to feed more and more data to the model over time, and repeatedly run the model to improve its performance over time. This way it can be reset and placed somewhere new and become just as effective over time.
4. I have just completed a full university course on embedded systems and have completed a handful of embedded projects as part of make-a-thon competitions. Embedded systems has been a bit of a hobby for me over the past few years and most of my projects were based around Arduino, ESP32, and the TI MSP430. My partner has worked at Amazon and Microsoft as well as a few local companies using AWS and is a computer scientist.