SPLASH!

SPLASH!

Inspiration

It happens without you thinking about it- you're trying to study for that upcoming Physics exam, but your phone keeps going off. You instantly grab your phone and get sucked into a world of dopamine and digital distractions. Life would be so much easier if you could just scroll reels instead of worrying about rotational momentum, but nothing worth doing is easy. That's why we made SPLASH! Psychologists say things are best learned when the punishment comes instantly, and we took that to a whole new level. SPLASH! will make you rethink pulling out your phone when studying, some users reporting symptoms of PTSD.

What it does

SPLASH! watches you while you're studying, recording your every move with YOLOv8. As soon as that phone comes out, an image is sent to Gemini API to confirm that you are distracted, and then roast you while you're getting soaked.

How we built it

We used YOLOv8 for phone use detection, Gemini API for messages, and ElevenLabs API for text to speech. We used an Arduino and relay to power the 12V water pump.

Challenges we ran into

We wanted to build the whole system on a Raspberry Pi 4, however, the Raspberry Pi 4's provided were defective. We spent most of our time trying to figure out how to flash the Raspberry Pi operating system onto the Raspberry Pi, only for us to find out they didn't work. We worked around by using the Arduino and a laptop to run the program.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to make the water pump extremely powerful by attaching the end of a pen to the pipe. We wanted a true punishment to stay true to the instant and harsh nature of effective psychological conditioning. We also got the webcam, API calls, and computer vision to run on 3 separate threads, allowing for our program to run without pausing or dropping frames.

What we learned

We learned how to work with hardware, both the Raspberry Pi and Arduino. For alot of the people on the team, this was one of their first coding projects, and for almost everyone it was their first hardware project. Learning YOLOv8, multi-threading, and using micro controllers was a very enjoyable experience for everyone, and made for a very enjoyable hackathon experience.