An Energy-Saving Air Vent In The Cloud Designed By A 13-Year-Old

Father and daughter team Gabi and Shani Zuniga put their heads together with neighbor and long-time friend Danny Eizips to create Ventix, a home heating and cooling device controlled by the cloud.

Ventix

Think of it like Nest, but one step into the future. While the Nest thermostat controls your entire home, the Arduino-based Ventix can be individualized to each room in your home or office. This tiny computational device communicates with the open-sourced Spark server and is hosted on Digital Ocean. It hooks into a mobile app as well as sends SMS text to your Pebble watch. The mobile app allows you to control the atmosphere in any room to which the device is applied.

Presentation Diagram

Zuniga and Eizips had been discussing this idea of redirecting airflow and saving energy in each room of your home for over a year and a half now. “There was even a similar Indiegogo idea that never delivered,” stated Zuniga. He may have been referring to KeenVent. This company actually was part of a past Disrupt and went on to Techstars, though they did acknowledge on Indiegogo that they have had some delays.

But it wasn’t until the Disrupt SF Hackathon that the group decided to put its idea into action. Zuniga enlisted his 13-year-old daughter as the app designer. This was her first ever hackathon but she’s been learning to create graphics for a while now. Shani designed the entire app for both iPad and iPhone and says she’ll now be working on one for Android.

remotecontrol

The group wasn’t sure if they would be uploading the idea to Kickstarter for funding or if it made more sense to go for a partnership. However, if they were to partner, they say it would make the most sense to partner with a vent manufacturer. “They have the hardware and the distribution channels. We have the technology,” says Eizips.

In any case, the group hopes to at least win a ticket to Disrupt. This would be the first Disrupt for all of them.