Senior CJ Valle hopes to be the latest Kickstarter success story. The engineering major, along with co-founders Craig Lewis and Andrew Schad, currently have their project, Sprav Water, listed on the popular crowd-funding website.

Sprav Water was created with the intent of helping the environment by means of technology. It is a meter that, through a smartphone application, tracks how much water a person is using while they shower.

“Sprav was born out of a university engineering project which encouraged us to examine energy usage in the home,” Valle said.
Sprav is customizable and the device’s properties and applications can be tweaked by any engineer.

“We decided to make Sprav open-sourced to make it easier for developers to make custom applications to do whatever they wanted,” Valle continued. “The possibilities are limitless. I’m personally hoping to see a shower-controlled coffee maker in the near future.”
Another project that came from the hands of a Case Western Reserve University alumnus and the mind of a Canadian engineer was the Pebble watch. It is a customizable smartwatch with just about as many benefits as any iPhone or Android; it set a record on Kickstarter.com, raising over $10 million in only 37 days.

Andrew Witte, 2009 graduate, served as the lead engineer for Pebble Technology and made the decision alongside founder Eric Migicovsky to take the product to Kickstarter after failing to recruit enough private investors. The watch is currently being sold on its website and in Best Buy stores for $150, with over 250,000 watches sold as of today.