30 - Random Acts of Kindness Hack

Imagine going about your day when suddenly a fun picture of you is taken and added to a slideshow among other pics.

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Inspiration

MIT is a difficult environment to survive in and often we can forget to look after ourselves and our happiness. The last week of March will be RAK week here at MIT, started by our very own group member Bettina Arkhurst. The goal is to go about the week doing random acts of kindness for anyone at all and hoping to brighten their day even if it is just a little bit. We want every MIT student to know that they are cared for and we are all here for each other. The aim of our project was to create a hack for use during RAK week.

This hack would take pictures of people and add them to a slideshow full of happy pictures of other MIT students. It would be alerted by a motion sensor that would go off when a person waved at the camera. Additionally we would have a poster for people to hold up during their picture!

How we built it

We used a Rasberry pi camera to function as the sensor and also take the pictures of the students. The light component consists of 6 LEDs (2 blue, 2 red, and 2 yellow), 6 330 Ohm resistors and and Iduino Uno. The lights smoothly cycle through multiple colors to create a soothing effect. Since the overall shape of the project is a heart, a warm soothing feeling really compliments the effect we are going for. The lights will light up the heart like we hope the heart will light up someone's day.

Challenges we ran into

It was difficult to work with the Rasberry Pi since it was our first time using it. There were also a lot of time contrains and we were unable to get all the pieces we wanted printed on the 3D printer.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we have jumped started our hack and will be able to continue to work on it for display in March and we are excited that we got the camera working and taking pictures!

What's next for Random Acts of Kindness

What is next is a surprise and you will just have to wait for RAK week to find out ;)

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