College Engineering Challenge

The Arial Home Initiative is offering $1,000 cash awards to students or teams of students who contribute ideas that will improve the functionality of our Arial Homes.  The details of this Humanitarian Engineering Challenge can be seen by downloading the PowerPoint file (below).  Your submission can be in any format that you wish, but photos, graphs, and short videos would be particularly valuable in terms of explaining your design.

Since we are seeking all the good ideas we can find, this will be an on-going challenge and will continue indefinitely with no limit to the number of $1,000 cash awards.   Please consider how you can use your creative energy to find new and better solutions to the major problems associated with poverty in this world.  

FIRST AWARD WINNERS!

The Arial Foundation is delighted to report that on June 1, 2009, a team of electrical engineers from the University of Illinois, Champaign, IL received the first $1,000 Humanitarian Award for their contributions to Arial Home's low cost, solar hot water heating system.  The team was led by Hunter McDaniel and Scott Chilstedt.  The U. of I. team developed software for an Arduino microcontroller (www.arduino.cc) which enables it to read a temperature sensor in the solar collector and intelligently control the flow of water to and from the roof top mounted collector and the insulated hot water tank.

-Tom Pirelli, Princeton BSE 1969, Executive Director of The Arial Home Initiative