This hack is intended to simplify the day to day lives of people all over the country. We analysed the main causes of frustration for many individuals to determine the best way to focus our efforts to change the world. We decided to focus on improving productivity of individuals through home automation. By automating mundane daily tasks, we would have more energy and time for creative and exciting projects.
We approached this problem by attempting to trigger common actions by monitoring smartphone position within a home. We designed an android app (since we all owned android devices) to trilaterate the position of a given smartphone using RSSI values from three Estimote beacons mounted at uniform positions. We chose to use the Estimote Beacons as a means of exploring and understanding the new hardware offered by this company. They serve our purpose extremely well since they are cheap, small, consistently adhesive, have a long battery life, and all in an attractive form factor.
We learned many important lessons in the process of completing this hack. We now have a very complete understanding of the Estimote android sdk and integrated javascript. We didn't experience all smooth sailing though, we had several large issues that required a lot of experimentation and research. The major one we encountered was in implementing the android java SDK BeaconManager class. I spend a long time working on a low level bluetooth connectivity app which would be able to return the distances to each beacon in range. Unfortunately for reason we still do not understand, we were unable to get this app working. Partly due to the universal inexperience with the tools, it was very hard for us to get help. In fact, we were unable to find another team using Estimote android SDK among all the hackers here today. We made significant progress towards the completion of this app, and hopefully in the future we could solve the issues we had at this event.
In the meantime, we investigated workarounds so we could continue development of the hack. By speaking with other hackers, we learned of a javascript application which would provide a base upon which to create our app. Sadly, this meant that all the hard work on an android java app could not be carried over. We used the knowledge gained from our java app to develop our javascript app very quickly. We spent the rest of our time setting up live tests and smoothing out user experience.
A key feature of our app is that it can save a location and an associated action, and perform that action when a smartphone enters the location. As a basic example, upon approaching your coffeemaker, our app can send a wireless signal to a custom hardware solution to activate the coffeemaker. The possibilities really are endless, since the app gives you complete freedom to create actions with different activation criteria.
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