Co-syn

Inspiration

We three were working with IDEO over fall break and realized how important it was to quickly 'download' findings from interviews. IDEO's really fond of Post-It notes because of their rearrange-able nature and often times would download findings on to Post-Its and arrange them on train windows, restaurant tables, etc. But what happens if one sub-team wants to download with another sub-team in a different location, as is often the case, and the knowledge is so precious it must be jotted and shared ASAP?

What it does

We write on a Post-It with a Livescribe pen and put the Post-It in an area surrounded by sensors coded for specific motion detection. As soon as we put the Post-It in the area, a digital post-it with the writing on it produced through the Livescribe pen will appear on our monitor, in the exact same location (relative to the area) as the one we put on the physical area.

How I built it

• We used some HTML, CSS, Javascript, C++, and Python
• We added SpaceTouch hardware and technology, courtesy of SpaceTouch, a team at the Princeton eLab
• We broke some wires by accident
• We iterated and came of with scrappy hacks to produce the effect we want during the demo
• We took said demo to HackPrinceton

Challenges I ran into

• No libraries for the hardware
• The hardware used C++, which we had to figure out
• We had a working demo at midnight, then a cable broke and we thought we were legitimately over, that everything was done, time to play ping pong all night, but then a funny miracle occurred and we're presenting tomorrow morning.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We have a product! We did not pull any all-nighters! There were moments of grind, highs and lows, mess-ups that sometimes turned into improvements, but we made it through!

What I learned

Ping-pong is cathartic. Ping-pong all day.

What's next for Co-syn

We're not sure how far we can take this because of other project commitments, but one possible next direction would be to work with SpaceTouch further to build a durable version of Co-syn that can actually be prototyped by design-thinking firms (especially Post-It-loving design firms)!