Project Green Light

Inspiration

We struggle and often find it awkward to approach and meet new people in the real world. We want to bring the comfort of interacting with people behind a screen to the real world using as simple and unobtrusive a system as possible. In addition, we want to create a tool which can measure the rate of change in the willingness for people to socially interact with one another in any given environment.

What it does

Project green light breaks the awkward uncertainty when approaching new people through a simple lighting system displaying the status of an empty seat in public places. The user simply sits down and sets the status of all the empty seats at the table. Whether you are looking for company, or looking to concentrate, project green light always works in your favor.

How we built it

The Beacon For Friends (BFF) was made using an Arduino which controls the manipulation of the product. Buttons were used to change the color on 4 RGB LEDs and the product was housed in a plastic container, which was designed to look modern and elegant. A web application interacting with the device was built using Python and Flask.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges was time constraints, because of which it was not possible to 3D print the case for the BFF. Another challenge was sending data from the device to the web server and maintaining a distributed system with high fault tolerance, which would have allowed endless possibilities for the BFF.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The greatest accomplishment of this project is its huge market potential of our project. With endless opportunities, this project can be used in almost every cafe, library or dining hall all over the world. We were also able to develop a website for the BFF: http://changethelight.me.

What we learned

We learned how to harness the power of the Arduino to create and design projects. We also learned a great deal about hardware-software integration as well as the importance of data in our everyday lives. Project Green Light gave us the ability to take a seemingly unmeasurable dynamic like social interactions and track it.

What's next for Project Green Light

We would be able to collect our own API and analyze it to add new features to the product. If the product gets fully implemented, we would be able to have a fault-tolerant system to allow a single user to access a device at any given time. We could also allow users to access the product from the personal device of their choice. [http://changethelight.me]

Built With

Submitted to

BoilerMake
- Winner 1st - 10th Place

Created by

I developed the CAD for the structure which included optimizing interior space and designing for aesthetic appeal. I also helped to error check the Arduino code, and soldered the proto-board.

Michael Bednara
Mechanical Engineer
I worked on building the web application for our project using Python/Flask. Spent a lot of time on designing the front-end of the website. Also, helped developing programs for the wifi-shiled of our Arduino device for sending data to our web application. It was my first time working with Arduino but I definitely learned a lot.

Albert Yang
Hacker, Entrepreneur, Photographer
I worked on the electronic aspect of the product involving Arduino, RGB LEDs and buttons. I coded the Arduino and tested the circuit on a solder-less breadboard and with the team designed and soldered the circuit onto a perfboard.

Adith Jagadish
I worked on designing the housing for the device along with creating all the content around the idea from the ideation phase. In addition, I managed the development process and kept the team on track.

Sameer Saiya
I worked on the design and build of the product. Along with the team, I developed the product and learned a great deal throughout the process.
I also worked on the presentation and documentation for the project.

Nihar Garg