Usagi Study Helper

Inspiration

Imagine that your final project worth 25% of your grade is due in two hours. You are hard at work because you need to pass this course otherwise you will be unemployed. Suddenly, you find yourself scrolling endlessly on your phone. ‘How does this always happen?’ you think to yourself as you become increasingly frustrated into the night. Today, many students of all ages struggle to focus on what’s important when it matters most. The Usagi Study Helper aims to solve this problem. By utilizing operant conditioning through negative feedback for scrolling and positive feedback at the end of each study session, we can effectively train the user to enjoy studying more and hopefully break the habit of scrolling on their phone when they intend to study.

What it does

The Usagi Study Helper has a designated location for you to place your phone before a ‘locked in’ study session. It has an infrared object sensor directed towards the phone to determine if the phone is removed, and a dial to set a timer, with two buttons to start and stop this timer. If for some reason the phone is removed from its designated location the infrared sensor will detect this movement and relay a message that causes our Usagi to go into ‘anger’ mode. ‘Anger’ mode will cause Usagi to glow red and create a disruptive melody. This mode will continue until the phone is placed back into its container. Ultimately this system is designed to help a student/worker remain focused without the distraction of their mobile device.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into was how we approached the project workload. Initially, we aimed to understand each individual sensor and component so that we could better understand the system as a whole, but since we overlooked the importance of having our code well-organized and saved. Additionally, we used up a lot of our time overcoming challenges with sensors. For example, our provided imu was at a different hardware address than the library for all sensors of the same imu model expected. We spent many hours debugging this issue and ultimately editing the library file itself fixed our issue. Additionally, we ended up choosing not to include the IMU in the final design, as we decided the feature would not make sense in a study timer. We also spent a lot of time figuring out the pinout of the amplifier for the speaker. This one truly puzzled us, as the pinouts on the board were written in chinese and the exact model was hard to find online. With some help, we came to a conclusion that in order to implement an amplifier, we needed to solder wires to the bottom of the pcb. We ended up not pursuing this path, both out of consideration for the event organizer’s components and also our lack of access to a soldering iron. Some minor problems that we ran into were the lack of proper tools such as screwdrivers to secure relay connections, version control issues in saving our code, and putting all the pieces of our code together.

How we built it

We built the system by first fleshing out the features that we wanted to have our timer to include based on the sensors we had available to work with.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One of the hardest obstacles we overcame was actually creating a melody for the device to play in its 'angered' state.

What we learned

Throughout the design and creation of this project we were able to get our hands on a real project, work through real bugs, and strengthen our hardware skills. We weren't simply doing math on an exam sheet, but practically applying Ohm's law to help create a safe and functional circuit.

What's next for Usagi Study Helper

We hope to gather more advanced components such as an audio device that can intake memory from an SD card. Originally we wanted to make the 'angered' state play actual audio clips from the character, but we didn't have this technology so we had to settle for a coded melody. This will bring more life to the Study Helper instead of being a generic project with only cosmetics.