Inspiration
Both of us have multitudinous electronic appliances. We have been surprised to find recently that they are racking up considerable costs on our (parents') electricity bills, despite the fact that we rarely use them. Some research revealed that the issue behind this "ghost" energy was a little phenomenon called "phantom load" - energy leaks caused by turned-off, or on-standby gadgets that are still plugged into an outlet. It's easy to fix this problem - just pull a few plugs, and you can save on the upend of hundreds of dollars a year. But you need to stay on top of all of your energy-leeching appliances - and consistently manage them!
What it does
We developed Phantasma as our solution, which consists of both a mobile app and web component.
The mobile app (iOS) helps you track your electronic appliances, and sends you helpful reminders to unplug them. Based on how long you leave them unplugged, Phantasma calculates your savings as well as projects your future savings. Additionally, it displays information on the worldwide impact of the app so you can see how you fit into the global scheme. It features a minimalistic UI and intuitive flow.
Our website consists of information about our service, and also displays statistics on the app's users. Furthermore, it has a calculator allowing you to calculate annual savings per appliance depending on how long you leave it unplugged for.
How we built it
Before our implementation, we created mockups and prototypes for Phantasma on Sketch. We used Swift and Xcode to create our iOS app, and utilized the Spring library for animations. We developed our website with HTML, CSS, Javascript (Angular) and PHP in Visual Studio. Firebase served as our backend.
Challenges we ran into
We had trouble encoding and saving custom classes to CoreData in our mobile app. Positioning items appropriately on the website also proved to be a challenge.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
In such a short time span, we're really happy to have created a multifaceted and fully functional service to help the environment. We're also proud of our UI and UX.
What we learned
We learned a lot about the customization of UI elements and persistent storage. It was also interesting to experiment with Firebase and create a backend that connects to both a mobile app and a website, instead of just one.
What's next for Phantasma
In the future, we'd like to launch Phantasma as a company and profit through in-app advertisements. Before doing so we'll also extend our service to Android. We think our idea and product has the potential to be used on an everyday basis and hope to expand to a large user base in order to maximize our impact.
Spark presentation: https://spark.adobe.com/page/0TaBatrb3cyps/
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