Go the F to Sleep

Inspiration

I've always wanted to build a noise detector in/near my kids' bedrooms to alert them if they were being too noisy when they were supposed to be sleeping. Thanks to Particle and SparkFun, I had all the hardware I needed, I just needed time to code.

What it does

Uses a noise sensor with two kinds of analog input levels for noise detection, whenever either input cruises a threshold the device will publish an event online and begin playing Brahms Lullaby. Meanwhile, IFTTT picks up the published event and sends an SMS to my phone. A tiny OLED display shows a numeric representation of the analog inputs.

How I built it

Electronics, wiring, coding.

Challenges I ran into

Time constraints while mentoring other hackathon attendees. (And harassing everyone to use Stream's API for activity feeds)

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I finally built a device I've been wanting for several years. My kids are too old for Brahms Lullaby now, so I might need to tweak the idea for older kids. It was also hard to calibrate the noise sensor with other noise at the event.

What I learned

How to write code for the Photon, how to play tones on a tiny piezo speaker, how to program the OLED screen, how to read and interpret analog signals, and how to get all of it working with IFTTT to alert my phone.

What's next for Go the F to Sleep

It needs a better speaker and music playback. I'd like to rig up a "three strikes" LED arrangement so my kids can see visually that after the third noise event, that I will get an SMS and at that point they are in big trouble. I'd have to factor in a decay so an LED would shut off if the noise level falls to an acceptable limit after a while.

Built With

• c
• ifttt
• photon
• sparkfun