Haojian Jin
CooTrading is a low-cost, energy efficient and flexible hardware/software environmental solution with many well designed features. This prototype system allowed users to have a better Energy Consumption awareness and eventually put these users in charge of these consumptions. Deploying the system to real families, we acquired extremely encouraging results, as users unanimously found that the system reformed their bad habits. This project was created in collaboration with 3 friends, I was the only person working on software.
This project was our project for Microsoft ImagineCup 2008. It was ranked 4th among 61 National Teams in World Final (Paris, France), was named China Champion(500+ teams) in Local Final (Beijing, China) and ranked 2nd in World Final, Microsoft Windows Live Award (Paris, France).
The theme of Microsoft ImagineCup 2008 is "Imagine the world where technology enables a sustainable environment". CooTrading is developed to helpe use their family appliances in smarter ways and help the global warming situation eventually.
CooTrading consists two major components: 1) a set of ZigBee wireless power plugs to collect the power consumption of house appliances; 2) an intelligent alerting system could remind people the energy waste by looking up the history.
We have developed the "data monitor modules" based on ZigBee wireless transmission. This low-cost, energy-efficient and flexible module can be used to collect the real-time data information of energy-efficient electrical appliances, and then, these data would be synchronized to our Data Center. Through the tiny "smart plug-in" in the video, CooTrading expanded its utility to all appliances rather than intelligent appliances only.
ZigBee smart plug from Haojian Jin on Vimeo.
Besides the energy-efficient techniques, how people use these devices also matters the consumption. Besides the behavior mentioned in this video, CooTrading tries to ameliorate users' habits in following ways.
Intelligent Alerting from Haojian Jin on Vimeo.