Eco.gy

✳️ Eco.gy is an energy monitoring service that you can install with one click. Track your energy consumption and reduce your carbon footprint across your devices today!

Inspiration

As members of the EPFL community, we have a unique opportunity and responsibility to lead the way towards a more sustainable future. By carefully monitoring and reducing our energy usage, we can not only save money and reduce our environmental impact, but also set an example for others to follow.

In today's world, servers are an essential part of modern computational systems. By monitoring their energy usage we can make our campus more sustainable, helping us measure and decrease energy consumption in IT.

What it does

Eco.gy is an energy monitoring service that you can install with one click. It monitors computational activity and pushes aggregated data to a backend in real time. Users can then monitor their energy usage and see how much CO2 they are producing by running their servers or devices, right from our dashboard.

How we built it

Our monitoring service was built with Python for the client and the backend, with a React app for the frontend connected via websockets. We measure values related to your CPU usage, and then estimate energy usage and CO2 production using our algorithms.

Challenges we ran into

We had a lot of challenges making our app work across different kinds of hardware and operating systems. Additionally, we have multiple surfaces: a bash script, a python service, a python backend, and a react webapp. We communicate with REST APIs and Websockets between these surfaces to make a seamless experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to create a seamless user experience that anyone with minimal knowledge can leverage in order to measure and decrease the energy consumption of their servers, clients and devices; helping improve digital sustainability.