Sassy Grassy

Inspiration

We all have that one friend - the one who's up until 4 AM every night grinding it out fueled only by energy drinks and that CS major mindset (or maybe we are that person and don’t want to admit it). If you ask them, they're just doing whatever it takes to make it in this competitive economy. But we disagree.

They deserve better. And we made that for them.

What it does

Sassy Grassy is a new and improved Chrome extension to help those of us suffering from the state of being “too locked-in” adhere to the 20-20-20 rule. Run the app, and every 20 minutes it will remind you to look away from your Mac and appreciate the important things in life with a fully immersive, multisensory outdoor experience.

By playing various sounds like water, birds, and other relaxing songs of nature at random intervals, Sassy Grassy keeps you from falling into a VS Code slumber. 20-minutes of screen time prompts Sassy Grassy to open her lid and reveal the real show with a chime — grass, which rises from the depths for your enjoyment. After a sufficient amount of petting, the grass returns back into itself and the process resets.

How we built it

To save time, Sassy Grassy was primarily made of laser-cut parts. Its box opens with two servos attached to dual-jointed hinges, while the grass rises on another servo-powered scissor lift.

The tech stack for Sassy Grassy consists of a chrome extension, built using html and javascript. The chrome extension is then connected via Bluetooth to an ESP32. A python server maintains the web connection in order for Sassy Grassy to communicate with the notification system enabled by the chrome extension. The ESP32 is programmed entirely in C++ and consists of a state machine that is used to determine if the grass has been touched or not.

Challenges we ran into

We are not mechanical engineers or CS majors. None of us have much web-dev experience, so making a functional, BLE interfacing, Chrome extension was a stretch. The box opening mechanism took half the time, because who asks an electrical engineer to make a box? Us, because we like pushing our limits.

However, hardware never fails to make things more complicated. After realizing that one ESP32 did not have the capacity to control three servo motors, we had to incorporate a second microcontroller (Arduino Uno) to activate the motor responsible for elevating grass into the heavens.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the good we are putting into the world. The design was highly technical and pushed us to better our programming, firmware, CAD, and hardware skills. In less than 36 hours, we learned how to interface web, Python, and Bluetooth to create a fully-functional design for the CS major in us all.

What we learned

None of us had ever built a chrome extension before, so doing so was a valuable learning experience. To make matters even more complicated, our chrome extension had to interface with a Python script to establish Bluetooth connection with our ESP32, so we had to learn how to set up a Flask web server that our extension could pull from via HTTP requests. Most importantly, however, we learned that it doesn’t feel great to not touch grass for 36 hours straight (enter Sassy Grassy).

What's next for Sassy Grassy

We know our users have busy lives. Thus, our next big move is to make Sassy Grassy fully self-sustaining with fully-integrated hydraulics and grow lights. Let it be a moral to our users - even if you can’t take care of yourself, Sassy Grassy can. And it should be an inspiration to you all.

We also know our users love AI. To satisfy their never-ending thirst for innovation, we will use an AI to track their screentime to find the perfect, individualized balance of work and relaxation.