Our team was excited to come to HackIllinois 2015 because none of us on had ever done a hardware hack. We got our hands on a Pebble Classic, but we could not think of a good way to use the Pebble's SDK to incorporate our original idea of drawing with motions detected by the Pebble. While we were brainstorming for a new idea, we found ourselves drifting on to Facebook, Reddit, or other time-wasting sites when we were trying to be productive. It then clicked: we should somehow get you to stop wasting time.
Enter BuzzKill.
BuzzKill detects what website you are visiting on your laptop, sees whether it is a time-wasting/non-kosher website (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Imgur, etc.), and if it is, starts a timer on the Pebble that tracks how long you stay on the webpage. Additionally, the Pebble buzzes every 15 seconds to remind you that you are still wasting time on that page! When you exit the non-kosher website and go to a kosher website (e.g. Google, Wikipedia, or any website that promotes productivity), the timer and incessant buzzing stop.
The BuzzKill app for Pebble is a good way to track how much time you spend on superfluous sites and helps put you back on track, whether it is writing a paper, finishing up an assignment, or actually leaving the computer and enjoying the outdoors (haha that's funny, the outdoors).
Our target audience is college students who are prone to procrastination (read: all college students). Our biggest hurdle was figuring out how to connect FireBase with our chrome extension, which tracks the url of the current webpage. We're most proud of how much we learned about the integration of multiple files in various languages (C with Pebble SDK, Javascript for Chrome Extension, FireBase). We definitely learned a lot about our own individual coding abilities, our dynamic roles as team members, and what we should all work on once HackIllinois is over.
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