Inspiration
We wanted to gain more experience meshing hardware hacking with IoT platforms and visually appealing web displays. So what's a fun way to do this?
What it does
The Tamagotchi game of old was loved by many. It taught kids to take care of a virtual pet, feeding it, walking it, playing with it and, most importantly, making sure it doesn't die. It is a classic among the early children's games. The Tamagotchi Survival Game revamps this fun idea by combining the physical and virtual world, adding to the factors that affect your pet/plant as it tries to survive and grow from a seedling to a towering tree... or other smaller plant haha. The plant can be tracked online through a web app, where players can keep a careful, nurturing eye on their delicate plants.
How We built it
The core technology that our project is built on is the Intel Edison and the sensors that come from the Grove starter kit. We utilize the sensors to track lighting data, temperature data, motion data, touch data, and displays the health and activity through an LCD display and three LEDs. The other crucial technology that we wanted to integrate with is At&t's M2X Internet of Things platform. This provides API's to both push to and pull from a database that stores all this interesting data. The last part would be to display the Tamagotchi in a fun way, through a web app on the browser. All in all, it challenged us to experiment with and learn a diverse set of skills and touched on many technologies, including C++, Hardware, Javascript, the Intel Edison, and M2X.
Challenges We ran into
The Intel Edison is still relatively new and is going through many iterations quickly. The board is not very forgiving to mistakes. The first night, I connected the sensors and got it connected to wifi. I felt confident because I had made a good amount of headway and I could take a nap. When I woke up, I discovered that I had forgot to log off correctly from the SSH connection with the board. This caused me to not be able to log on for the rest of the day and reset the wifi. Without the wifi connection, the chances of connecting to the IoT platform was low so I spent most of a day working on reflashing the board or trying to find a work around. This was very frustrating and swallowed up a huge amount of time. There were neither any Intel or technical At&t staff present to help with these issues so it was hard trudging on.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Even though a lot of time was wasted, I'm proud that we didn't give up and, at least, put something together in the end.
What I learned
This was my first time at MHacks so it was awesome seeing the culture at one of the oldest college hackathons in the country. I really enjoyed meeting people and taking part in the culture. In terms of technical skills, I learned more about the Intel Edison interface (it is changing rapidly) and At&t's IoT platform, M2X. We were also able to hone our skills and learn more Javascript.
What's next for Tamagotchi Survival
As Intel's resources for the Edison continue to improve, we will no doubt be able to make improvements to our game and the way players can interact with their pets.
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