by Hannah Fair, Student Public Relations Writer
In the past four years, two Cedarville teams have been awarded Technology First’s Internet of Things (IoT) Award of Excellence–Student Project Award. This year’s computer engineering senior design team received the Award of Excellence in the student project category for their laundry monitoring app at the Dayton Club in Dayton, Ohio on Wednesday, May 1.
Computer engineering students on the design team include: Luke Lambert (Bay City,MI), Ethan Gatchell (Red Lion, PA) and Alec Weinhold (Random Lake, WI) along with Mason Cox, an electrical engineering major from (Oconomowoc, WI).
— Clint Kohl
Technology First is an Information Technology (IT) industry trade association seeking to transform the Dayton region into the gold standard for best-connected IT communities. Through their awards program, they recognize IT innovation. This is the second time in the last four years that Technology First has honored a Cedarville student team.
The laundry monitoring system involves both hardware and software components. The app makes doing the laundry process more user-friendly by notifying students when a machine is available as well as when their laundry is finished in the washer or dryer.
There’s a box with electronics that communicates with the washing machines to monitor the power that the machine is using. They determined the different amounts of power that the machine uses at various points during the cycle. This power gauge predicts the stage, and thus the availability and time left on a cycle.
The application sends information through wireless internet to a cloud computing platform hosted by Amazon Web Services. This information then appears in the laundry monitoring app on your phone or computer running a browser.
The students engineered their project in Lawlor Residence Hall on the campus of Cedarville University. The app is easy to use and displays graphics of each washer with either a green symbol for “unoccupied” or a red symbol for “in use.” Students can sign up for text alerts so that they are notified exactly when their laundry is finished.
The system is similar for dryers, but instead of power gauges, they used temperature monitors to determine the cycle stage.
“I’m so proud of these students,” said Dr. Clint Kohl, faculty advisor and professor of computer engineering. “They did really excellent work; they overcame difficulties and at each problem, they were able to overcome. They are deserving of recognition.”
Located in southwest Ohio, Cedarville University is an accredited, Christ-centered, Baptist institution with an enrollment of 4,193 undergraduate, graduate and online students in more than 150 areas of study. Founded in 1887, Cedarville is recognized nationally for its authentic Christian community, rigorous academic programs, including its Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering, strong graduation and retention rates, accredited professional and health science offerings and leading student satisfaction ratings. For more information about the University, visit www.cedarville.edu.