Am I Busy? Jonathan Lam Grace Ma A+V box

Website UI

Inspiration

When remote learning and work from home first began, many of us created impromptu workspaces at home: whether using our bedrooms, kitchens, and other spaces. But as remote learning continues, a common problem experienced by many is being interrupted by housemates during meetings, work hours, and classes. We realized there isn't usually an automated form of communication to indicate availability from the touch of your fingertips.

What it does

Our project uses a front-end UI website to allow users to input their schedule into a daily planner. Using Wifi, an ESP32 chip will be able to read these values and turn on a green LED for "free" and a red LED for "busy." If the current status is "busy," the OLED display will also display how many hours until the user is free. The hardware is intended to be mounted on/at the door of the user, and the website can be controlled from inside the room on a laptop. To be more energy efficient, the LED and OLED display are only activated by motion sensor when a housemates waves his/her hand in front of it to learn the current status of the user. Additionally, the hardware has a push button, that upon being pressed, will display the current time. This way, housemates and users can quickly check the current time.

How we built it

The website was built with HTML, Javascript, and CSS. The website will accept user input for planner entries and will write data to a Google Sheets spreadsheet (our method of an API database). The website will also draw data from this database so that there is a visual planner reflecting the user's inputted events.

Challenges we ran into

Since this hackathon was remote, Jonny operated the hardware component, and Grace operated the front-end website component as well as setting up the API database. This is both of our's first hackathon, so right off the bat, the task seemed daunting. Grace has also never coded in javascript before, and only briefly in HTML/CSS, so there was lots of trial and error.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really proud of what we were able to come up with, and how we were able to get data to and from a database while working remotely. We're happy with the nice UI design and the relative promptness of the website.

What we learned

For Grace, this was her first time using a database, so we both learned how to work directly with one.

What's next for Am I Busy?

For the website, we want to deploy a toggle button that can detect whether the user is busy or not directly from the extracted data. I also am curious about deploying this website with a more robust database (Google Firebase?) and web dev language (React?). The aesthetic implementation of the toggle button is already implemented (and commented out in the code), but the data has yet to be linked.