VS Self Energy Audit

Project Whiteboard
Postman connecting to api in the pre-UI era

Inspiration

In VS's search for ways to benefit the public in saving energy at home we ran across what is called an "Energy Audit." Basically, a professional will come to your house and inspect a large amount of things for energy waste and make suggestions. While extremely beneficial, this can also be extremely expensive; thus, the VS Self Energy Audit Software was born.

What it does

Allows users to go down a checklist of what an energy audit consists of, recommend how to fix any problems or gives suggestions on energy efficiency, and then shows the user the impact of those changes on a month by month basis... or at least... that's what it was supposed to do.

How VS built it

Blood, sweat, and tears... so many tears. Since this is a proof of concept we entered our own products into a database and then used an api to pull that information to a locally hosted website.

Challenges I ran into

Initially we spent 1.5 days trying to design another project but we realized that what we were making wasn't innovative enough and to add additional features would extend beyond the constraints of the allotted time. So we opted to switch projects instead in order to have something more unique.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Our team consists of 3 Electrical Engineering majors and 1 Mechanical Engineering major yet we were able to make a functional API and database in DocumentDB when we had 0 prior experience on either.

What I learned

Oh jeez, where to begin... Sleep is important first off and then that I'm getting old. On a more serious note, we learned how to construct an API with C# and connect to a DocumentDB database... how to set up a DocumentDB Database...

What's next for VS Self Energy Audit

We will continue our project and finish the software. Finishing the UI and completing all of the endpoints on the API are our primary objectives. We also want to get an authorization to use a Best Buy API from Best Buy so that instead of entering data into our database, we can pull product specs from Best Buy. As of right now there are several things we would like to improve and expand upon as this project is more of a proof of concept.