U Hungry?

Circuit test of LCD, LEDs, and magnetometer reading

Inspiration

Everyone always wants the best food they can get, so why not make a device that can easily tell you in what direction you can go to get to that great 5-star restaurant?

What it does

Our hardware/software combination uses an magnetometer to determine what direction you are facing. Using the information from the TripAdvisor API, when you face in the direction of a restaurant, the name of the restaurant appears on the LCD screen, and the rating of the restaurant is shown on five LEDs.

How I built it

The system consists of a circuit that connects the magnetometer, LEDs, and LCD screen. The arduino controls these components and the code is based on data from a C++ file that parsed the information from the TripAdvisor API.

Challenges I ran into

In terms of hardware, a challenge that we came across was finding ways to condense the circuit into something compact and efficient. Interacting with the components themselves did not prove to be too difficult. Writing the software became more of a challenge in C++ because we had to find ways to more effectively parse the information from the API. Interacting between the C++ file and Arduino was also a challenge that we had to work around.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We were able to communicate with the magnetometer through i2c communication and get relatively accurate readings (aside from some noise). Getting the LCD screen to print what these readings also gave us a great feeling of accomplishment. With the greater challenges in coding, overcoming these was very satisfactory since we did not get hung up on these problems for too long.

What I learned

Through this project, we have all gained greater experience in hardware-software communication and project-based time management.

What's next for U Hungry?

Creating a direct connection between the arduino file and C++ file is definitely a future improvement. Using real time data from some sort of map system (Google Maps) to be able to show restaurants and their ratings at any location as long as it can connect to the internet could be a big step for the future.