Resistor Calculator

Inspiration

Our fellow team member, Ryan, was tired of manually calculating resistor values. Being an electrical engineering major, he often went through the tediousness and trouble of matching colors on the tiny resistors to their color code charts online. This project is a solution to his everyday hassle, using current technologies to make prototyping of electronics on breadboards a bit more fun!

What it does

This project is a skill utilizing Amazon Alexa. When given the corresponding voice commands, Alexa will open our application/skill and prompt the user to give her the four colors of a four-band resistor that we want to know the resistance and tolerance of. If the four colors are legal color bands of a resistor, she will appropriately return the correct calculation of the resistance with how much tolerance it has. If a color is not legal, or if misread, Alexa prompts the user to try again.

How I built it

We used event-driven and serverless computing platform AWS Lambda to run our node.js code. Hooking it up with the Amazon Developer Console through our application id and endpoints, we were able to debug and test the functionality of our code and Alexa's speech recognition consistently throughout the hackathon.

Challenges I ran into

It was difficult to fully understand the Amazon Alexa skills functions when taking the boilerplate code from Amazon-related Github repositories due to lack of clear documentation.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

While completely new to Amazon Web Services, Developer Console, and the overall hackathon environment, we completed a basic construction of our idea that we thought of onsite without the assistance of any mentors.

What I learned

We learned about how AWS Lambda and the Amazon Developer Console interacts with one another through ARN, the backend for the VUI in Amazon Alexa, and much more! It was a great experience collaborating with one another "independently" and working with new technologies!

What's next for Resistor Calculator

We recognize that there is a lot more potential to Resistor Calculator that can be made given more time. After the hackathon, we plan to add more features to this project including more flexible speech recognition and the calculation of more than just a four-band resistor.