Drive Lock
Inspiration
Hundreds of thousands of people will die in car accidents due to distracted driving within your lifetime. There are plenty of ways to prevent distracted driving but all are voluntary, making it unused by teens and easily forgotten by adults. What if it wasn't voluntary?
What it does
Before starting your car, your phone must connect to your car. When your phone is connected to your car your phone is locked and your car is allowed to start. As long as your car is running your phone is locked. This guarantees your phone will be locked while driving, only allowing access to mapping applications and phone calls for emergency situations.
How we built it
There is both hardware and software involved. The hardware sits inline with the cars ignition system, only completing the circuit when the phone is connected and locked. For rapid prototyping, we used a Raspberrypi 3 A to serve as the hardware to complete the car circuit. The other side of the project is all in the application. It was built in the Ionic Framework. The Ionic Framework is a frontend to Cordova and implementing Angular. Cordova allows cross-platform application development for both iOS, Android, and Windows by treating the application like a local ran webpage. It is written in HTML, CSS, and Typescript (a language built on top of Javascript). Using native device utilities we use the onboard Bluetooth to make a connection with the car (Raspberrypi 3 A).
Challenges we ran into
Bluetooth is an unexplored subject for every member of the team. Taking on a Bluetooth challenge allowed us to learn about sending data, using socket communication, and creating network listeners that don't listen to your typical HTTP requests. An even larger and challenging task taken on by the team was the use of circuitry. Dealing with circuitry and physical hardware is an unexplored region of our team. A large number of other challenges occurred during the design and development process including simple mistakes with lots of confusions to diving into completely unexplored fields of knowledge to complete the project.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud to say that we have successfully created a prototype design of what can save millions of lives from ages 16 and higher. We are proud of the graphical design from the mobile app, the physical hardware, and the cleanly written and well-scripted code fueling the project.
What we learned
Grace learned an entirely new language of Python (Piling on to her knowledge of Javascript and Java). Our entire team studied the details and importance of sockets as well as how to use them to make data flow between devices, as well as a whole slew of small facts to improve our knowledge.
What's next for Drive Lock
If the ideas grab ahold well then getting a patent is well on its way. With a patent over the idea, funding would be requested to work on a real physical device (that is not a Raspberrypi 3). With a patent, design, and funding we would be looking at a full-scale manufacturing line to sell to the world, saving lives every day.
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