Students end up in Paris for Imagine Cup

The Cal State Long Beach Engineering Department sent off a team of four students to Paris July 3 for its power-saving engineering project.

CSULB's Embedded Applications Technology team advanced to the finals of the Microsoft Imagine Cup's embedded development competition with 14 other teams.  The prizes of the international competition, running until July 8, include $15,000 for first place, $10,000 for second and $5,000 for third.

Team EAT's Automated Power Cycling Network project envisions an energy-efficient house by using a central computer to manage the house's power consumption.        

Homeowners would be able to prioritize their electricity consuming devices into the central computer via a touch screen kiosk. As a result, when the house reaches a certain wattage intake the computer will automatically turn off the lowest prioritized devices.

Nicolas Tisa-Leonard, one of the EAT team members, felt that with India and China using more energy as they reach an industrial peak and with the world using almost as much energy as it produces, leaves humanity two options.

"We can start producing more [energy], which would mean more fossil fuels, or we could start saving more," Tisa-Leonard said.

Already many large buildings owned by big businesses have similar kinds of power-saving systems hardwired into them.  However, the high cost of such a system has made it unaffordable to homeowners and small-business owners.

Team EAT's project has solved expense problems by staying away from any high-cost technology and by making their system easily installable. Instead of mounting the system into the walls of the house, small devices called responders would be attached to the house walls, which would be used as a bridge between the system and the device the homeowner would want to manage.

"It makes it easier, it makes it smaller and it's affordable," Tisa-Leonard said.

The base price of team EAT's system would be $500, which would cover the cost of managing one appliance, with an extra $40 for each additional responder, said Juan Gutierrez, another member of the EAT team.

This year's theme of Imagine Cup, the 6th annual competition, was "Imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment."

While the team's project is fairly simple it is something that accomplishes what the competition is all about and is something that people can relate to, said CSULB professor Bob Ward, the team's mentor who is also accompanying the team in Paris.

The team's chance of winning, however, is tough to figure since it's unknown whether the judges will focus on hardware, software or marketing, said Ward.

"It's a large competition that draws from all over the world and that makes it very prestigious," Ward said.