Lights Out

Inspiration

Since starting off college, we’ve noticed how much electricity we waste— from leaving lights or fan on to inefficient mini-fridges. “It’s not our energy; we paid the tuition." But it is also our responsibility to save energy, so that we can play our role in sustaining the environment. And starting at the college level is the perfect place: somewhere close to our hearts and colleges have the ability to scale operation to thousands of students, provided the long term savings outweigh the immediate costs as indicated by link ). But different from recommendations for light switch reminders, education programs, and monetary incentives, LightsOut takes advantage of our natural psyche and competitive spirit—to use less energy than your dorm mates—for the better of your personal satisfaction, the college’s savings, and environmental sustainability.

What it does

LightsOut is a revolutionary app that not only tracks your dorm room electrical consumption, but allows you to compare yourself to your dorm’s average consumption. This takes advantage of our natural tendency to perform better than the people around us. LightsOut allows you to directly compare electrical consumption against a fellow classmate through the User Search page (you can only compare through following each other). LightsOut will also display supportive comments on the Home Page and streak goals on the Statistics Page with subtle color cues to incentive reduction in consumption. In the Statistics Page, you can review weekly and longer-form data, as well as individual electrical socket data to determine which pesky power strip wasn’t switched off. And in case that electricity consumption reaches abnormally high levels, LightsOut should alert the user. We hope that LightsOut’s design and software choices will guide fellow students to lower electricity consumption in all the right ways.

As a note, LightsOut should collect data installed meters on electrical sockets and breakers through Wi-Fi or Bluetooth and then to the cloud where the data is securely distributed to each individual user.

How we built it

We built LightsOut using Apple’s SwiftUI framework. We designed LightsOut, focusing on usability and simplicity for iOS applications. Many and most American college students have iPhones, and we believe that the best platform to communicate data about electricity was straight through the phone at their fingertips. In the future, we would like to implement an android-inclusive application, integrating the larger world into our sustainability mission, but we did not have sufficient time or resources.

Challenges we ran into

As first-years and first time hackers, there was a lot of ground to cover. First, we had no experience devising electrical/Arduino mock-ups of implementing an ammeter into a socket to measure power consumption. And even if we could devise such an object, we would need to develop a back-end system to handle the data collection and parsing. However, we are not in the least familiar with JavaScript and the nightmares which we have heard about it. So, we decided that our time is best and uniquely and efficiently spent by developing a strong graphical user interface with all the potential systems in place. This was our first step. But none of us have done app development before. Even so, we tackled headfirst into the belly of Swift and SwiftUI, spending time on everything from libraries, structures, syntax, navigation, random data generation/structures, and general GUI design.

Accomplishments that we're proud of & What We Learned

And through all of the hardships comes the sunshine. When we walked into the Hackathon, we had no idea where we were going to go. But now, we are glad that we were so lost: we argued and discussed different pitches and projects, settled on LightsOut, and then subsequently got lost again in SwiftUI. Now we know basic Swift, and we can all code basic apps. We feel empowered to go out into the world and just make something that actually does something. And when we look back at where we came from, we are amazed at how far we’ve come (inspired by Technoblade).

What's next for Your App

For specifically completing LightsOut, the next big thing is to create a functional back-end which compiles the data from all electrical sockets (through Bluetooth or Wi-Fi) and create a proper user account system which works consistently with college domains. But in terms of creating an ecosystem a lot more is to be done. First, we would need to pitch our product to different colleges (or places which can afford mass installment of socket trackers). We would use arguments, say that their initial expenses would be paid back within 10 years. Then, when the physical electrical meters are set, we would mass push and advertise LightsOut to get the app and the name of said college students. If the results are good enough (energy and money-wise), then more colleges will pitch into LightsOut. As students graduate, they may take their energy saving habits far into the future. They may install tracking sockets in their own homes. Or workplaces may decide to use LightsOut to save energy, too. And hopefully, LightsOut will take over the world, in a storm of cost-reducing, neighbor-upping, environment sustaining frenzy.