Guardian

Inspiration

So I found out about the old wall UNIX command and thought about how you could use that to annoy people. Then I thought of how when you're staying inside all the time, it makes your melancholy and lethargic, which makes you stay inside more, thereby creating a viscious cycle. If only we can harness annoyance to get people, especially developers, to take a break from their computers and go look at some trees.

What it does

Guardian comes in two parts, a C program that prints a passive-aggressive message of encouragement on top of all pseudotty devices (essentially all terminal emulators). The second part consists of a physical device, Buddy, that slaps your hand and blocks the keyboard in concert with the Guardian alert.

How I built it

Guardian is written in C and communicates with Buddy, which is powered by an Arduino. I used terminal control sequences and the /dev/pts subsystem to overwrite existing terminals. I used a RS-232 library to communicate via serial over USB to the Arduino.

Challenges I ran into

When a machine slaps you or nags you, your automatic reaction is hostility. Since the user ultimately has all power over their computer, most products designed to annoy don't have long lifespans. However there is the exception of products purposely designed to be cute. Buddy is designed so that it is easy to mount a plushy or figurine of some sort on top. This makes the user emphasize with it too much to dispose of it easily. Likewise, Guardian's alert messages use aesthetic ascii art and mascot characters to convery their messages, which allow for the emotional disarmament of users.

Likewise, although the physical parts for buddy took less than an hour to design, it took an entire day and 4 seperate tries to print of the 3 parts that made up buddy. As such the final product does not come w/ it's own mascot mounted on top and is only a case for the slapping servo.