Home Hero!

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  Finished wiring!

Hello, I’m Audrey Chen, and this is my Blossom Hack Ohio University Hackathon submission. Although there has been increased awareness and development, our society doesn’t accommodate individuals with disabilities as adequately as it should. An example is blindness and visual disabilities, where people still use canes, guide dogs, and human guides. With this project, I wanted to address the technological development for those who are visually impaired and try my "hand" at creating a device that would make daily lives easier. To begin, I used a raspberry pi pico with Thonny as my programming IDE. I wanted this device to simply provide as much information about things that were much further away from an individual than their other senses could pick up on. With a PIR human motion sensor that measures 20 ft and an ultrasonic distance sensor that measures 15, I went into my project with confidence. Moving human and animal objects can pose more of a danger, so I coded my human motion sensor to output when a human or animal is detected from infrared light. However, this was the first time I ran more than one module on the pico. I started to struggle on implementing the sensors to run in tandem. However, I didn’t give up, and I was able to code them to run simultaneously. Another problem was the accuracy. There was a delay from one module, and I had to find the right place to collect data so it would match to real time. So, I adjusted my code to provide as much accuracy as possible on this kind of hardware. Then it worked! The code ran, the distance sensor returned data with accuracy, and everything was able to run together!
Further steps to take with this project would be to stream the information as it came in output to speech, but my ohm speaker had built in cord connection. Also, running it on an app on bluetooth was a goal, but I also lacked the hardware.

Overall, I learned how to wire a wifi module and have it transmit, how to run sensors in tandem, and how to persevere despite my limited experience! Also, what would be cool is if this bracelet were to have more compressed hardware, so it wouldn’t be as clunky. Disabilities should be respected and viewed in a positive light. Everyone is different and unique, like superheroes. I hope that “home hero” provides a bit more superpower than people already possess.

Built With

• hardware
• pi
• pico
• thonny