Byte Gang Smart Clock

The Byte Gang Smart Clock is designed to wake you up in the morning by presenting you with useful info about the days weather, time, temperature and even your personalized google calendar for the day!

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Inspiration

We were inspired by the word clock which presents a cool but simple way to show the time and attempts to draw your attention from modern day technologies (such as your phone) which provide you with not just the time but a plethora of other information. We sought to build a multipurpose 'smart' clock which presents all the information one would need to start their day from the minute they snooze/stop the alarm with future potential to take advantage of cloud computing and AI to analyse individual schedules and possibly help individuals suffering from mental or social problems (by analysing anomalies in their calendars).

What it does

The clock shows the current time, temperature, weather and schedule. It also has an alarm that is automatically set to ring 1 hour before the first scheduled event for a given day.

How I built it

We use the google cloud platform to host virtual machine instances to store data from an individual's calendar and run our web server and app. This web server would then be able to communicate with the arduino that is the microcontroller controlling all of the clock's hardware.

Challenges I ran into

Setting up a web server using node.js on a virtual machine on google's cloud platform along with a mongodb database to store calendar information for a given user. We also had trouble designing the hardware, PCB and designing the framework with CAD of the clock within the given time constraints. We also had trouble learning and using all of the API's to gather all of the required information and get access to someone's google calendar.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

It was nice to see that we were able to build and learn all of the various technologies to run such an application on the server whilst building so much physical hardware to communicate with it.

What I learned

Learned how to quick build and deploy a node.js server and set up a cloud computing instance to run a webapp. We also learned how to incorporate various API's to get access to almost any information available on the internet. We also got experience working and building hardware such as the PCB and framework in CAD.

What's next for Byte Gang Smart Clock

There is definitely potential for improvements and incorporation of modern cloud computing technologies such as ML to provide a further unique and powerful scope to the application of the clock to make it truly smarter. One of the more promising and potentially useful future applications for the Byte Gang Smart Clock would be to send a notification to close friends or emergency contacts if the web application detects unusual activity/inactivity or trends on someone's google calendar.

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