Inspiration
Tired of trying to focus on studying in a library, only to be disturbed by children running amok, students having loud discussion, or boomers watching TikTok at maximum volume etc.
What it does
The lamp: a simple desk-sized lamp that flashes a friendly warning when it gets too loud, so people self-correct The webapp: every lamp connects to the monitoring web app that lets librarians, TAs, or facility staff etc see all zones at a glance, track hotspots over time, and get alerts when a location stays noisy, so that they can intervene as timely as possible.
How we built it
The lamp: we used raspberry pi pico W which has wifi access to read from a sound sensor and send this data to our web application as well as control our LED. The web app: we used React and Tailwind for the frontend and flask for the backend server with REST APIs to fetch from 2 endpoints, one to obtain the list of lamps with all of their information and one to update the lamps existing information.
Challenges we ran into
- CORS: As usual, for a full stack project, CORS became an issue when fetching the endpoints. Luckily, flask has a flask-cors library which allowed us to overcome this challenge easily.
- Sound sensor: we had to manually adjust the sensitivity such that the threshold would be appropriate for our surroundings. Additionally, we had to constantly move to different venues to test our sensor due to the hackathon venue being too loud at times.
- Raspberry pi: the raspberry pi did not draw enough power to keep the portable chargers we were using awake, which made testing significantly more frustrating. As a workaround, we added more LEDs to fix the problem.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- MVP: We actually managed to create an MVP in the short span of 24 hours.
What we learned
- Tech stack: As some of us were more familiar with software while others were more familiar with hardware, by working together, we were able to exchange knowledge and improve in the fields we were newly exposed in.
- Teamwork: Since most of us did not know each other before this hackathon, we learnt how to work together with people that we have only known for a short time.
What's next for HushLight
Designs: we aim to develop nicer and more interesting lamp designs. Web app: features such as controlling the light level or the activity of the lamps from the web app itself is next in our list of improvements.
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