Smart Alarm Clock

Inspiration

Yesterday our team had decided to meet up virtually to discuss project ideas for the hackathon. Unfortunately, one of our members slept through the meeting and missed it. When asked about it, he said that he kept multiple alarms but kept snoozing them. This gave us the idea of the Smart Alarm Clock.

What it does

The Smart Alarm Clock plays a sound when the time entered is reached. The user is given the option to snooze the alarm. But, the app checks the luminosity of the surrounding and does not stop playing the sound until the luminosity is increases, i.e, lights are turned on. Also, the user is played a simple phrase and they have to type in what they hear. They are given an error margin on 25% on the text.

How we built it

We divided the project into 3 main parts. The first was to build an alarm clock app. The second was the luminosity component. The third was the text to speech component. In the end, we brought all of these components together and integrated them in a way which works what we has originally thought of.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge that we faced was integrating all our different components together to make the Smart Alarm Clock. Some other challenges that we came across were getting the alarm sound to play when the time is reached, calculating the time difference for the timer with the local time of the user, getting the text to speech code working, etc.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Given that most of us are beginners to programming, we are proud of the fact that we made a functional alarm app with a couple of additional features. We are also proud that all of us made it through the hackathon without giving up and getting frustrated.

What we learned

Most of us were beginners and were new to a lot of the technologies used such as Android Studio and Github. We learnt how to add widgets and make an app using android studio and most of the basic operations such as pushing and committing in GitHub. We also learned how to detect luminosity and interacting with sensors, converting text to speech, and having a live timer on an app.

What's next for Smart Alarm Clock

For the next version of our smart alarm clock, we want to use vision processing to detect lighting effects, body positions and other factors that allow us to determine whether the person is going to head back to bed or not.