MOTIONBEATZ

Inspiration

Our team wanted to find promote safe driving and modernize older cars yet we had also unintentionally implemented a method for hands-free audio control. The main goal was to promote safe driving and modernizing older cars due to friends around us being distracted on their phones when trying to change their music and there are also those around us that unfortunately do not have a dashboard within their vehicle.

What it does

MOTIONBEATZ is a infrared gesture sensor that allows for hands-free audio control anywhere you desire based on respective gesture for each control.

How we built it

We had started with trying to connect our raspberry pi via bluetooth to a phone. Next, we attempted to implement gesture controls through python and i2c. To integrate the screen we had to do custom wiring and soldering in order to create a functioning screen.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was making the audio stay with the car speaker and not transfer to the Raspberry Pi. Another huge thing was that we initially were going to use a 3.5 inch touchscreen, but the one we had wasn't compatible with the newest version of Raspbian, which we needed for some features. We had to downgrade to a low resolution I2C LCD, but we were able to do more with it than we thought. Splitting up tasks was difficult too because only one person could SSH into the Pi at a time, so we had people work ahead on tasks that sometimes didn't even become a feature.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're especially proud of how responsive and easy to use our product is. What makes us most proud, however, is just how versatile and applicable this is in life to those of us that listen to music a lot (our group members!).

What we learned

If the website looks sketchy, DO NOT get your entire OS image file from it. Breaks help a lot,; once you get tired the team loses momentum and it's hard to be efficient. Trust was another huge thing we had to learn. All of us would obviously like to oversee everything ourselves, but we had to trust that our teammates would finish their job while we focused on ours.

What's next for MOTIONBEATZ

We'd love to use the original 3.5 inch touchscreen that we envisioned at first! The smaller one is fine but it doesn't look nearly as modern. To be honest, I can see thing being a huge product embedded into things like cars and bluetooth speakers, so we're interested in pitching this to investors.