Sentinel

Inspiration

The COVID-19 pandemic basically made me spend two-thirds of a day staring at a screen, and my interest in computer science isn't really making that amount go down. In the past 11-ish months in quarantine, I went from being somewhat "active" to being a coach potato that only slept, ate, and sat at a desk all day. :((((

In a sad attempt to change this, I created Sentinel, a desktop application that watches over your health and reminds you every now to look at the world outside of your computer.

What it does

According to a random WebMD post I found people should aim to get their eyes off their screen every 20 minutes.

Every 20 minutes, Sentinel sends a little notification for you to stop looking at your screen and get a bit active by selecting from a list of activities you can define.

How we built it

Sentinel is built with Python and utilizes the win10toast and tkinter modules.

Challenges we ran into

• Figuring out how to use custom fonts
• Figuring out how to make tabs in tkinter and change the background colors

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• That it works! :D

What we learned

• How to use the tkinter library
• How to use Python to send windows notifications with the win10toast module
• That we should all start taking breaks to prevent eye strain :D

What's next for Sentinel

• I think making a web app would be better so no one has to install Python
• I couldn't really figure out how to turn it into an executable file so I should probably do that one day

Built With

• python
• tkinter