Wakey Wakey Chicken Bakey

Inspirations

Every year, over 100,000 car accidents are caused by drivers who fall asleep or feel drowsy while driving, causing significant injuries and fatalities. To decrease the number of accidents, this hardware project is designed to help combat drowsy drivers who may be sleep-deprived while driving.

What it does

The IR sensor will continuously emit low-power infrared light to the eye, and the light reflected off the eye will return to the sensor. If the sensor doesn't receive any infrared signals, the buzzer will go off, producing a stimulus that'll cause the driver to wake up.

How we built it

By using a Arudino Uno R3 board as our main microcontroller, a buzzer is attached, and the IR sensor is connected using jumper wires. Afterwards, the code to program its functionality is written using VSCode.

Challenges we ran into

Some major challenges we ran into were finding the thresholds for the buzzer to go off only when it is near the eye and when it's closed. Another challenge was creating the eye blink sensor from scratch using an IR transmitter and receivers, resistors, and Op-Amps. However, this idea was eventually discarded, and we decided to buy an IR sensor.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of making a safe device that applies to every driver in the world. Although our creation is strictly a prototype, the fact that we created a plausible solution to an underlying issue that causes hundreds of thousands of car accidents is something we are proud of. We believe that our idea is something that should be carried forward and built to be marketed for people to use.

What we learned

We were able to apply critical thinking as well as enhance our research skills to be able to develop an eye blink sensor. By learning how to use the Arduino microcontroller and the IR sensors, as well as programming it, we learned a lot throughout the process of this project.

What's next for Wakey Wakey Chicken Bakey

Since we believe that this idea can go a long way, and that this project can be applied to lots of people who may need it, we can make CAD glasses so that there isn't a microcontroller board hanging from the IR sensor.