Inspiration
30,000 people die every year in car accidents in the US. Ordinary drivers cannot afford cars with sophisticated technology such as those found in a Tesla or the BMW with a wide host of sensors specially installed for driver protection. But, we have cheap technology that can allow decent safety to people with existing cars without such sensor technology.
What it does
It detects traffic in the vicinity of the car using DriverAssist's technologyTM (patents pending) to give a visual real-time feedback to let the driver know of disparate dangers on the road - such as an oncoming vehicle about to collide it.
How I built it
For the sake of the Hack-a-thon, and approaching with an MVP mindset, the team decided to use Arduino Uno board as a starting point. The board was connected to simple sensors such as the TCRT5000 IR proximity sensor. Two sensors are connected to the board to simulate a car approaching on the left or right of the vehicle. A node js emits the captured data on its server. A client application (web-app) reads these values from the server and displays in real time dynamic views of approaching traffic.
Challenges I ran into
It was tricky to work with sensors. Java does not implicitly support serial port communication. Thus, we moved on to use Node.js which was slightly easier. Integrating all the different pieces was also a waking nightmare.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
As a team we are proud to pick up electrical engineering skills (wiring up the sensors) along the way despite having no prior experience.
What I learned
To persist when the going became difficult. We exhausted all means in order to send values from the hardware to the display. It was not easy.
What's next for DriverAssist
We would like to continue working on this in an evolutionary manner to the point we can market it.
