Recently, my team (Aaron and I) participated in this 24hour Hack ‘n’ Roll Hackathon, which is held in NUS. The criteria of this hackathon is to build something new: even awesome & useless projects are welcomed!
Initial plan
For this hackathon, our initial plan was to design an android application that will track the users eye while the person is driving & to warn the driver if the android application detects that the driver is falling asleep. It will warn the user by sending a signal to an Arduino device (attached on the Steering wheel), in which the Arduino will vibrate & make a beeping sound. The following picture shows a summary of this idea:
Although we have this idea, we encountered too much difficulties in the process of realising this project idea, and had to abandon this in the end. (Maybe I can try to work on this idea when I have time…) However, we learnt many things from the difficulties encountered, which brought us to work on another idea.
DeFocus – DeFocus and get to task.
And this is the final idea we used for our project. The main idea behind this project is to minimse unnecessary distraction of a smartphone by displaying contents deem important onto the Arduino display, which will be located in every part of the house. This means that the user can place their phones away & focus in doing their task (e.g. cooking), and the display (placed in the kitchen) will only show, ring & notify important events or information to the person without the person touching the smartphone. The information will be transmitted via bluetooth.
Anyway, more details can be found here: http://challengepost.com/software/defocus
Although we did not win, we enjoyed and gained a plethora of experience from this hackathon. Below shows some images of our prototype. (Credit goes to Aaron for helping me shoot these images of the prototype. Thanks!)
