Chill-O-Meter

time to chill!

Inspiration

It was difficult to come up with a hardware hack idea, but we eventually decided to make a gadget that helps you out with productivity.

What it does

This device will allow you to split your time between work and breaks without too much or too little leeway. It does this by splitting your time into three segments, time when you should be working, indicated by a green light, time when you are approaching a break, indicated by a yellow light and a fan too cool you off a bit, and time when you should take a break indicated by a red light and the same fan spinning at a stronger speed. At the same time all three of these stages are accompanied by different encouraging messages to keep you motivated!

How we built it

We built this project using a simple Arduino circuit with a DC motor and a liquid crystal LCD display.

Challenges we ran into

As computer science majors only really used to software, we had to learn how to work with circuits and hardware in general for the first time along the way. We picked up the knowledge that we learned from workshops, research, and the hardware team to learn how to make a circuit of our own, even when we had to start from scratch a bunch of times.