Water You Looking At ?!

Inspiration

When browsing Reddit, or any other social media, it is sadly all too common to come across disturbing comment. This has led to the creation of "eyebleach", or cute wholesome content to help counter the negative effects of viewing cursed images. However, this is sometimes insufficient - there are times when we wish we could truly rinse out our eyes.

What it does

Water you looking at ?! delivers water to a user's eyes when they view cursed images on Reddit. A servo motor is attached to a small jig with a syringe full of water, controller by a Raspberry Pi. The signal to push down on the syringe plunger is delivered when a python script detects disturbing content being viewed on Reddit.

How we built it

Hardware: servo motor, raspberry pi, syringe, a few screws, some 3D printed parts, lots and lots of hot glue.

Software: A Python selenium-based script launches a Firefox window that tracks the webpage the user is on, and tells the raspberry pi to activate our special eyebleach delivery mechanism if the user comes across eyebleach-needing content.

Challenges we ran into

It turns out that depressing a tiny syringe plunger using weak motors in a small wearable form-factor is not so easy.

Making browser extensions is hard when you barely know Javascript, so we reverted to janky Python. Also, the our lack of USB to Serial board and lack of time prompted us to choose a very janky way of activating the motors: automatically finding the Raspberry Pi terminal on the computer using pywinauto, clicking on it, typing in the command to activate motors, and finally navigating back to the browser window for a seamless experience.