ProductEve

The desk pet that holds you accountable for doomscrolling

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Inspiration

We hate doom-scrolling, and many students are facing the same issue. Currently though, there's no easy way to fight it effectively. Uninstalling the apps cuts you off from your social connections, but screen time apps are easy to bypass. So, what's left?

After asking around we discovered some people had up to 5hrs daily on social media and this hindered what they could achieve in a day. One of us remarked half-jokingly 'I like it when someone is looking over my shoulder and keeping me accountable'. Then we imagined, what if our product did exactly that for you? Or even depended on you doing so? That is ProductEve.

What it does

Our Product, Eve, is a pet. Rather than feeding, it gets happier when you are productive and sad when you aren't. When you wake up it will greet you on your desk and be fully content after a productive night of sleep. Once you leave the house, inevitably, you will need to use your phone, maybe you use google maps*, which is absolutely fine, but you also might end-up doom-scrolling on the train, or during the lectures, making the pet grumpy. When you get home your pet will be grumpy, because you spent a lot of time on social media. But after putting your phone down and studying, it will cheer back up. And it is there to support you by looking cute and even having a built in pomodoro Timer.

Your and your friends' ProductEves talk to each other, share information about social media use, to keep you on track for a better, more productive you.

*this is marked as a productive app in the mobile application as to not be penalised for it

How we built it

First of all, we dragged over a massive whiteboard and got to doing our MoSCoW requirements as Prof. Graham would want. The next step was dividing up roles and getting to working. Our app has two clear components, the circuitry/esp32 and the companion app which connects to it and communicates the settings and screen time data. We had a pair of pair programmers working on the app while we had team members designing the 3D printed case as well as another doing the wiring on the breadboard.

Challenges we ran into

One major challenge was a disconnect in product vision. We had evolved the ideas over time there emerged two major factions. After much discussion we managed to consolidate this vision and get back to a point where everyone was working towards one unified goal.

Another issue I'm sure many can relate to is API struggles where we had to debug and find one of many possible issues. Was it time zones? Perhaps the API was depreciated or even not suitable for our specific OS? Of course we were just using the wrong function.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. Real-time access of the pet to the screen time of your phone
  2. Man-in-the-middle proof pet-phone authentication
  3. Two ProductEves can exchange information using BLE

What we learned

  1. A team of 4 SWE in hardware
  2. Touch on new technologies like Arduino, C++, React Native
  3. Design and create a prototype of a 3D shell and a 2D pixel art sprite sheet
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