Pingi is a physical and digital product designed to reflect home electricity consumption and to raise awareness to the daily use of electricity in households among families.
What is it?
Pingi is a physical and digital product designed to reflect home electricity consumption and to raise awareness to the daily use of electricity in households among families. When installed pingi connects with a measuring component to the electrical cabinet of the house. During the first week Pingi collects the data received from the electrical cabinet. After the first week the family turns on Pingi every day as they gather together, they guess together what their electricity consumption was during the day, they mark their guess on a led light meter on Pingi. After they have marked their guess Pingi will light the actual amount of electricity consumed on an additional led light meter. This creates live feedback and the comparison will be vivid on Pingi. Pingi is also designed to evoke family discussions about electrical consumption by using cards. The cards have information, tips, division of responsibilities and points for discussion.
By reflecting the home electricity consumption and presenting it in a tangible way, playfulness and creating discussion we believe that families will be more aware and hopefully will be able to save electricity.
Project Info
Students: Inbar Lavan, Adi Grotes, Ronnie Laufer, Uri Amiel, David German
Lecturer: Dr. Noa Morag, Dr. Oren Zuckerman
Technological lecturers: Zvika Markfeld
Teaching Assistants: Ofir Sadka, Nadav Bahat
How does it work?
Technology is based on Arduino Uno hardware. The board consists of a RTC component, which allows the power consumption sample to be made more accurately. NeoPixels, a potentiometer and another power button are used to interface between the user and the product - in the first stage the user guesses the power consumption with a potentiometer and his guess is displayed on the LEDs and in the second stage the user presses the power button and waits for the actual power result. Using the Eeprom library allows us to store the data even when the product is offline.