(Bounce Software Accelerator client LEAF wins $7,500 at Case Western Reserve University’s startup competition)
Logically Engineering Automation Features Ltd., or LEAF for short, is on a mission to make electrical engineers’ lives easier. Specializing in construction automation, LEAF is working on a solar design application to help aid in the electrical wiring of solar panels.
LEAF recently participated in Case Western Reserve University’s Morganthaler-Pavey Startup competition, where CEO Evan Haug and his colleagues presented for the Idea Track and won $7,500. The competition is open to CWRU students and alumni and gives entrepreneurs the chance to win up to $10,000 to support their business idea.
The team plans to use the funds to attend the Solar Power International 2022 conference in Los Angeles in September, where they will exhibit their product to potential customers.
We caught up with Evan to chat more about the company and discuss what it’s like to be a part of our Software Accelerator.
Bounce: What does LEAF do?
Evan: Stringing is the process of physically connecting solar panels on a rooftop. Only a certain number of panels can go together to make it an electrically safe project. It’s an engineer’s task to have the whole project strung up; each panel wired up sequentially.
Stringing takes about 40 percent of engineers’ design time. The other 60 percent involves laying the panels, finding the hardware, performing the calculations and generating the rest of the drawings. But 40 percent of that time is spent drawing lines in AutoCAD. We want to eliminate that process. I set out to develop an app that could do the electrical design for you.
Basically, the platform allows engineers to bring their expertise and calculations to the app. The app will take this information and create the stringing design for the solar panel layout. This allows engineers to generate the designs instead of drawing these lines in AutoCAD manually. If changes occur throughout the project, engineers can make adjustments.
Bounce: What was the inspiration behind LEAF?
Evan: I was interning during undergrad at an electrical company that was specializing in solar, and I was the engineer tasked with stringing design day in and day out. There was very little electrical engineering involved in the process and it was frustrating.
Bounce: Tell us about your experience working with Bounce
Evan: We got involved with Bounce after our engagement with I-Corps through the University of Akron Research Foundation. There have been a lot of Northeast Ohio resources that Bounce has connected us to including Thompson Hine LLP, which handled legal and LLC filing work. Heather Kramer from HJK Digital is helping us build our website, logo and other marketing collateral. We also are working with Mark Teague from Marcum LLP who is advising us on the financial and accounting side.
Bounce: What advice do you have for other entrepreneurs?
Evan: All these great resources and people around us push us to move forward as quickly as possible, and that’s been valuable to have a little push behind us.
However, entrepreneurs shouldn’t be afraid to take things slow. We’re all working on LEAF part-time, and things move forward at a crawl. We’ve made some thorough decisions and talked things over with advisors. That has set us on the right path to move forward more quickly in the future.
To learn more about LEAF contact Kehley Coleman, LEAF marketing officer at kcoleman@leafsolardesign.com.