Dorm Buddy

Tired

Inspiration

We were inspired by personal experience, as students new to shared housing we were looking for better ways to communicate with our room mates and monitor our rooms. We thought that an all-in-1 dorm management system would be amazing to have!

What it does

The dorm buddy system has a few key pieces of data that can all be accessed through the website, dormbuddy.tech . You can see the temperature in the room, the humidity of the room, a list of times the door was open, the last time the door has been opened, and the status of the room as set by your room mate! The status of the room is set by the user, who wields the dorm buddy remote. There are three settings, Open, Quiet, and Do Not Enter, with the intention of streamlining shared living.

How we built it

We built the physical technologies using an Arduino (Elegoo) uno, an ultrasonic sensor, a moisture and temperature sensor, 3 LEDs, 2 breadboards, a potentiometer and many wires! We enclosed the device in cardboard for the viewer's pleasure. On the website side, we used Next.js to build the frontend of the application, and proceeded to use the rest of the ME(R)N stack to build the backend, complete with a secure login system and authentication using JWT to match.

Challenges we ran into

In troubleshooting our device, and on very low sleep, one of the LEDs managed to pop in Abhi's face. This caused a slew of issues pertaining to the device, and after much troubleshooting we found that we needed a new remote sensor, and that we should no longer rely on port 13 on the Arduino. This took up a lot of time coming up to the deadline, but we are glad we were able to complete the project despite this.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Coming from no Arduino experience, no C plus plus experience we were able to build a functioning device with many capabilities. It took a lot of research, trials and tribulations to be able to put it all together in time for the deadline. It also took 15 plus hours of straight coding to create the website and backend, something that we are particularly proud of given how much we were able to get done in such a little amount of time. It may not be the prettiest website, but it really works!

What we learned

We learned just how much we are capable of. As freshmen, we do not have much experience under our belts, very little projects or LeetCode solutions to show for our tenacity and willingness to put our heads down and get something done. Just the fact alone that we were excited and willing to work on this project all through the night should show the power of being engaged in our work, and is really a lesson as we take our careers to the next level later on.

We learned so, so much about

What's next for Dorm Buddy

There will always be improvements that can be made, but the main reason we were inspired to make dorm buddy was to solve our own problems! I can imagine shortly we may be collecting the supplies to make one for our own personal use, improving the website and much more.