George Brown College fighting climate change with Kinect
Project Greeni was the first place entry in the software design category at the Canadian Imagine Cup Finals, let’s learn more about how they want to help change the world!
The Problem:
Global Warming and toxic pollution from power plants
The Solution:
Save energy by only running lighting and ventilation systems as needed
Technologies Used:
Kinect, Azure, Windows Presentation Foundation, .NET 4.0 Framework, Phidget Library
What did they do?
Save energy. It sounds simple enough, but how do you actually do it? That’s what Team Greeni: Timur Sharaftinov, Dmitry Zhivotovsky, Vasily Gurin, Alecsander Granger and their mentor Leo Salemi set out to figure out.
You’ve seen it yourself, you walk down a city street at night and the skyline is lined with nearly empty office buildings lit up like Christmas trees. We’ve had motion sensors you could install in office buildings for years, but they are purely based on motion (have you ever sat too still in a meeting room and had the lights turn off?) and they don’t always integrate well with existing building automation systems. In addition, they only control lighting, not ventilation systems.
Team Greeni decided to use a Kinect, carbon dioxide, and light sensors to collect data then process that data in the cloud using Azure and determine when to turn lights and fans on and off.
The team did a live demonstration at the Imagine Cup finals of the motion sensor controlling the lights and the Carbon dioxide detector controlling the fan. They have done a test of the system at the iCREST lab at George Brown to show how easily you can reduce electrical consumption using intelligent sensors. The red line below shows the original energy usage based on traditional time controlled environmental systems. The White lines show the energy consumption using the Greeni System.
The system also includes voice control and can be used for someone in an assisted living situation.
As the winners of the software design category, Team Greeni will be travelling to Sydney, Australia July 6th to represent Canada at the world wide Imagine Cup Finals. Wish them luck in Australia! I promise we’ll let you know how things go!
Next year you could represent Canada at the world finals! The Imagine Cup is an annual event. We’ll be announcing categories for Imagine Cup 2013 this summer.Got a project course coming up this year? Why not build a project that you can enter in the Imagine Cup? Hopefully this time next year I’ll be writing a blog about your work!