BloomBot

Inspiration

Staying in contact with long-distance friends/relationships can be super difficult. It’s usually just texts or notifications. We wanted something that made interaction feel more physical and expressive, like a small, moment to show someone else that you're actively thinking about them instead of just another message. BloomBot came from the idea of turning communication into something you can see and feel.

What it does

Flower opens up via servo motors necessitating a power supply due to high current demand. Furthermore, there is functionality for Blynk to turn the flower on, and make it open, or alternatively using an ultrasonic sensor as someone gets closer the flower turns on as well. The last feature is showing text through an LCD display and having that text "Blynk" in morse code.

How we built it

We built it through using an LCD, a 3D Printed Box with CAD Considerations for electrical components, an LED, two breadboards, 3 large servo motors, power supply, and an ultrasonic sensor.

Challenges we ran into

Originally, the larger servo motors cost too much current to be powered by an Arduino, so we had to adopt and learn how to use the Power Supply to power the entire circuit. Another challenge was the LCD display having too much current taken away from it by the aforementioned motor, which necessitated different wiring schematics.