Alfred - The Virtual Butler

Devices
Pucks

Inspiration

Have you ever stayed in an airbnb room, a hotel, or even crashing to a friend's place and found yourself knowing nothing about where things are? Well now, with an echo and a bunch of bluetooth beacons you could label every corner of your house and let our AI, Alfred, tells you or your guests where things are when you need it

What it does

Bluetooth beacons have NFC that points to a web app. By tapping your phone to the beacon, a webpage will pop up where you can give label to each beacons. And whoever needs to know where, say the spoons are, you could just ask Alfred through echo and it will point you to the respective beacon

How we built it

We programmed each of the bluetooth beacon to beam URL through NFC, so any phone that taps it could be taken to the website. We have a dedicated nodejs server running in Salesforce's Heroku that handles APIs and talks to a mongodb database hosted in MongoDB Atlas. We also have an Amazon Alexa app deployed in AWS Lambda that handles the natural language processing that acts as a voice interface

Challenges we ran into

There are a lot of separate moving parts in an IoT project, the hardest part is to stitch them together, and make sure they play nicely with each other. For example, we had trouble accessing our NoSQL database through Alexa's Lambda server, so we decided to reroute it to our dedicated server through REST API

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Able to program in variety of mediums, the embedded chip of the bluetooth beacon, the amazon alexa, front-end and backend web applications

What we learned

How awesome HTTP is, you can connect a lot of stuff by REST APIs

What's next for Alfred - The Virtual Butler

Future improvements would be clear labeling on each of the beacons so that it's going to be easily recognized. Also make each beacon blink when Alexa calls the beacons