Doomsday Clock — Canvas Assignment Tracker

Inspiration

Students often log into Canvas, jump between courses, and check assignment due dates individually. With multiple courses and Canvas Cloud notifications, it’s easy to miss something important. There’s no single dashboard that aggregates all assignments at a glance—so we built Doomsday Clock to solve this problem.

What it does

Doomsday Clock is a countdown timer that collects, organizes, and alerts students about upcoming assignments.

Collects — Integrates with the Canvas API to fetch courses and assignments.
Organizes — Sorts by due date, course (e.g., ENSC151, MATH151), type (assignment, quiz, exam), and status (past, due soon, upcoming).
Warns — Triggers visual and audio alerts when deadlines are near using an LED bar and alarm system on a Raspberry Pi.

How we built it

12-hour goals

Display all assignments in a unified calendar view.
Implement an alarm and LED countdown on a Raspberry Pi.
Integrate the dashboard with the alert system.

Frontend

HTML/CSS/JS with a React-like modular structure.
Tailwind-inspired styling for clear visuals (colors, cards, calendar).
Dynamic dashboard with filters by course, type, and status.
Calendar view for easy visual tracking.

Backend

Direct Canvas API integration to fetch courses and assignments.
CORS proxy handling via corsproxy.io to bypass browser restrictions.
Assignment parsing and due date calculations in vanilla JS.
Sorting assignments by course, type, and due status.

Module / Hardware

Raspberry Pi (Pico W) for countdown, LED display, and alarms.
Buzzer module for audio alerts.
LED bar module to visualize upcoming deadlines.

Challenges we ran into

API — Initial scripts couldn’t access Canvas data; resolved with a CORS proxy. Course matching across multiple APIs required building a reconciliation system.
UI — Absolute coordinate system caused display issues; switched to a ratio-based scaling system for responsiveness.
Raspberry Pi — We attempted to connect the webpage and the Pico using Wi-Fi, but wireless connection was beyond our payload. We opted for a wired connection through a serial port.