Untitled Princess Carolyn Project

s h a r k b o i

Inspiration

More information in the hackathon vlog.

Everyone has a daily routine. For me, that would be waking up, drinking tea, skipping class, and coding until I pass out from exhaustion. However, I find one part of this process to be excruciatingly mundane. That would, of course, be the drinking tea part. In fact, there are over 10 steps to drinking tea.

Pour water into the kettle
Place the kettle on the stove
Turn on the fire
Wait for the water to boil
Turn off the fire
Add tea leaves into a pot
Pour the water from the kettle into the pot
Pour the tea into a cup
Bring the cup back to your room
Move the cup towards your mouth
Tilt the cup
Open your mouth
Tilt the cup back
Close your mouth
Swallow the tea
Clean the cup

This is a daunting number of tasks and no one should have to go through this ordeal.

What it does

Luckily, we came up with a solution. You know those old beer bucket hat things? Well, our solution is a better version of that. Rather than sucking on a straw, open your mouth and the straw will deliver water directly into your mouth.

How I built it

Spark AR is really great for detecting facial gestures. There is a mouth open gesture that we connect to a patch that connects to our script. The script sends an HTTP POST request to our Node.js Express.js server running on the Google Cloud Platform's App Engine. When the value of the mouth open variable changes, the server receives a request to update the mouth open value. The Arduino connects to a Python script using pyserial and requests to implement short polling to the server. On the value change, the Python script sends a serial string that alerts the Arduino to turn the pump on/off.

Challenges I ran into

The latest Spark AR version has no networking. Sending an HTTP request without a content type to our own server which expects an application/json content type is a bad idea.