SnekTracker

Inspiration

Hey there, I'm Kenny, writing for me, Nikhil, Ethan, and Sekhar. (But it's 4:36 AM so don't expect any writing miracles.)

Ever wanted to keep tabs on your roommates without intrusive GPS-tracking software? To fill this need, Nikhil (my roommate) devised a clever solution. He set up a corkboard next to the door with pins representing each roommate and different areas representing different locations -- there's spaces for "Dorm", "Campus", "Dining Hall", and "Other" (with some later-added subdivisions). Unfortunately, I have not read or watched Harry Potter :((( but I was told this was inspired by "that clock in Harry Potter." For this hackathon, our team decided to build an actual clock for this purpose, along with an app that could be used to set the clock from a phone or computer.

What it does

We created a simple desktop app using Python's BeeWare framework, which sends values to a server running on a Raspberry Pi, which controls a servomotor which turns the dial on our clock (made from a Crossroads compostable dinner plate -- we also bought an empty 1868 pizza box for 2 flex dollars for the cardboard but ended up not needing it). The desktop app has two pages -- one where you can view everyone's location (and choose a person to edit the position of) or refresh the page, and another where you can set someone's location. A set of 4 physical buttons attached to the Raspberry Pi controls which person the clock should follow, and my teammates are currently setting up a system of LEDs to mark which person the clock is following.

How we built it

^ above

Challenges we ran into

None of us are in any way experienced in hackathons, and for 3 of us it was our first, so there were a lot of problems. We could barely choose a framework (or even language) to code our app in. At first we wanted to use React, but we're all in CS61A and are in total far more experienced in Python, so we settled on using BeeWare (in Python). What ended up being a huge problem was that the documentation was very lacking in detail and there were very few examples and tutorials available online that could help us fix our problems.

It was intended for our app to work on desktop, Android, and maybe IOS, but due to some wonky behavior from BeeWare's Toga toolkit, the app doesn't have full functionality on Android. We also didn't have time to set it up to work on IOS.

Also, it's 4:52 AM and I think we're going to go insane.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

WE MADE SOMETHING COOL! YAY!!!

What we learned

Man we learned so much about so many things, from setting up servers to writing apps to using Raspberry Pis to crash coursing on HTML and CSS to how to survive in Cory Hall overnight. But most of all, we learned how much fun hackathons are and we're totally ready to do it all again.

What's next for SnekTracker

It's getting late so we'll probably just meet up again next weekend to finish our LED stuff.

Built With

• beeware
• python
• raspberry-pi
• toga