InTheMoment

The perfect way to capture happiness — effortlessly preserving the moment while staying fully immersed by automatically taking a picture when you're filled with joy!

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Inspiration

As a child, watching fireworks were always so mesmerizing. It was a way to make special memories, and I wanted to capture that through video recordings. However, I eventually realized I was so focused on trying to imitate the feeling, that it felt like I wasn't actually experiencing it. Despite that, I wanted something physical to look back on AND to be there when such special times happened.

What it does

InTheMoment is a program that takes a picture of the user when they smile! It stores this image in their local disk so they will be able to access it easily.

How we built it

OpenCV was used for the face-detection and smile-detection. It was mostly built on VS Code, using the QNX ToolKit to create a new CMake project! Raspberry Pi 4 was used in the beginning, along with the Raspberry Pi Camera.

Challenges we ran into

Originally, I used the Raspberry Pi 4 and the Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3, as well as QNX to display the live camera. However, I had lots of trouble using the camera and taking images, which is why I pivoted to using the laptop camera instead. Admittedly, the Raspberry Pi Camera is probably better quality than the one on my laptop, but mainly for convenience I decided to switch last-minute. I had a hard time with Raspberry Pi, especially since it was being run on QNX as the OS instead of Linux, which was what majority of people were running it on. It felt like I was getting conflicting advice from different sides of the internet, making it a lot harder to know what steps I should take next.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite Raspberry Pi being incredibly difficult to figure out, it was so satisfying being able to pop up the camera onto a monitor. This was the first time I've ever touched any kind of hardware, so the Raspberry Pi was quite a challenge for me! It was fun figuring out how it worked, what all the parts were for, and being able to connect it!

What we learned

It's hard to work with OpenCV if everything is in c/cpp! Hardware is ... hard and computer vision is pretty cool. Raspberry Pi is also really cool, but can be hard to use sometimes.

What's next for InTheMoment

Currently, I want to be able to hook up the Raspberry Pi Camera to the Raspberry Pi and use that camera instead of the laptop one. Right now, the rectangles are put onto the camera feed on purpose, but when taking a picture, it would be better if it didn't show up on the saved image.

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