Honorable Mention #4
Travel WIZard
Matthew Pennell & Aaron Thomas
U.S.
The incredible Travel WIZard is an embedded server application that helps you find airfare deals. The useful system uses Kayak, an online travel search engine, to explore the Internet. It then returns data that can be graphed to reveal the cheapest time of year to travel. The Travel WIZard features a WIZnet W5100 Ethernet controller and a Microchip Technology PIC24FJ128GA010 MCU, which resides on an Explorer 16 development board. The board includes a 32K × 8 serial EEPROM, LEDs, buttons, and a 2 × 16 LCD.
“The Travel WIZard is an embedded server data-mining application. It allows the user to acquire airfare data to look for trends in ticket price. The software is written in such a way so as to support eventual expansion to other automated Internet tasks. Ultimately, we wanted to see if we could design a customizable platform that could be programmed to do any type of automated online data mining task. In addition, of course, to the WIZ810MJ with W5100, the system consists of a Microchip Explorer 16 development board with PIC24FJ128GA010 MCU and 32K × 8 serial EEPROM. From a hardware perspective, we appreciated how easy it was to prototype with the WIZ810MJ plug-in module. From a software perspective, we found it easy to quickly learn to use the W5100. We found the part to be an ideal tool for learning the nuts and bolts of how the Internet actually works under the hood.”— Matthew Pennell & Aaron Thomas
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