Goode Morning

physical system design

Inspiration

Waking up in the mornings is a hassle. We decided to build an automatic morning assistant that helps with the simple action of preparing for the rest of your day.

What it does

It announces specific location-based information such as temperatures, time, and date. The device also shows the information in text on a display. Furthermore, the device also features a motor that controls curtains which would be used to let the morning sun shine in.

How we built it

We used an raspberry pi and programmed the screen display, the motor driver, and the announcer in python using vscode on a separate windows machine. All the files were sent over ethernet to the raspberry pi device and tested with physical electronic circuits laid out on a breadboardç

Challenges we ran into

Accessing the raspberry pi was a challenge since we didn't have micro-hdmi so this delayed our hacking for 3 hours. We ended up fetching an ethernet cable and used ssh for remote access on the raspberry pi.

We also had a good variety of non-functioning components. The LCD display which we initially tried testing our code with was not displaying characters even if the backlight was functioning. We also had a faulty motor which after switching an alternative fixed our problem and allowed us to continue.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to accomplish most of our goals but we would've liked to have gotten a curtain for our demonstration. It would have been pulled using a conveyor belt. We are proud of getting a functioning system running despite the difficulties we faced.