Door Fail Safe

Door Fail Safe device

Inspiration

Our inspiration to build this project was that we wanted to gain experience using both hardware and software to complete a goal. We thought this idea would be humorous yet useful at the same time so we all decided to create it.

What it does

Our device/program will minimize all of your browser tabs instantly if the door to your room opens.

How we built it

We used a Grove vibration sensor connected to a raspberry pi to detect when the door opens. If the pi detects signal, it sends information to a python script which in turn executes an osascript on the remote desktop that will minimize all browser tabs.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a few challenges along our journey of developing our fail safe. Our first problem was trying to boot the raspberry pi and connect it to our desktop. Then we had to figure out how to relay information from the vibration sensor to a python script. Lastly, our main challenge came when trying to send information from our python script to the remote desktop.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to get the raspberry pi working without a display source. We were also able to piece together different sources of input from the raspberry pi and the desktop to run one final script.

What we learned

We learned how to boot raspberry pi's. We learned how to connect the raspberry pi through bluetooth as well as how to ssh from the pi back to the desktop. We also learned how to create AppleScript executables.