The Force

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  Hand doing the force

Inspiration

While doing a software engineer co-op I got sick of the tedious

git add . git commit -m "message" git push

I wanted to make this process more fun for me and people like me at my work, and more accessible to those who struggle doing it.

What it does

The goal for our project is to make pushing branches in GitHub much easier and much more fun! Our original goal was to make a VS code extension that would be called "The Force". This extension would allow us to git add, commit, push, pull, and checkout branches depending on what hand motion we did to our camera. Similar to Jedi's and Sith's in star wars the shape you made your hand into would trigger a certain command to execute in the terminal. An add would be a flat hand, a commit would be a fist, a push would be you pushing your hand into the camera, a pull would be pulling your hand away from the camera, and a checkout would be a soft swipe of your hand across the screen. While it's fun in the Star Wars aspect we also wanted to appeal our project to the handicapped. So we wanted to add speech to text recognition, and text to speech implementation for those who cannot see.

How we built it

We built this by first creating a motion detecting API. We know of motion detecting API that existed before but we wanted to build our own because of how much control we would have over the API when we build it from the ground up. At first we looked into other motion API such as googles, and Leapmotion but we decided that with what we wanted to do we needed our own. And it'd be a good experience for us as well. Initially we wanted to test to see if our motion sensor API could detect basic movement like holding up a certain number of fingers, but eventually we want it to do what we described it to do above. Unfortunately during this hackathon we were not able to get it working all the way due to time constraints. As for as executing command in the terminal we made .sh executable files that would be executed when our motion sensor API detected a specific movement.

Challenges we ran into

Being a 2 man team was our biggest limitation in all of this. Our project was a little too ambitious for just two people to do. At first only one of us was working on the API while the other was working on the implementation of the API and text to speech, but after some complications with the AssemblyAI implementation we both started working on the API full time. By the time we had only a few hours left our API was barely done and we had little implementation! The idea is still great but if we had more than 2 people so that someone was working on the implementation of the API or more people to help test and come up with idea for the API it would've gone smoother. Another issue we came across was python functionality plugins. We wanted to use some libraries that were only available on certain versions of python so we had to use wheels and other methods to integrates libraries that were should not have been available. This created even more bumps down the road.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Nonetheless we're glad we went for such an ambitious project! Instead of finishing a project in the first 3 hours we spent the entire time working on our project and enjoying the hackathon! And now we have something even bigger to look forward to at our next time in a hackathon! I really love that idea and I think once it's refined and tuned it could be very innovative and fun.

What we learned

We learned that sometimes it's okay to have limitations. Near the end of the hackathon we started to stress out a little bit because our API wasn't done and we still have to make the addon for VSCode and integrate other parts. But it's okay to sometimes have limitations in what you can do, and it's not worth it to stress yourself out. Next time though I'd definitely like a bigger team!

What's next for The Force

The Force has a bright future in future hackathons, I think it could be a really fun project that isn't limited to just github commands. The API we're using for the project could be used for a lot of other things! I'm excited to see what else it can do and what The Force becomes.

Built With

• bash
• python
• ubuntu