Notifi

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  Notifi

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  inside the Notifi

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  Output on PubNub

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  Team (Jason, Philip, Frank, Eric)

Inspiration

We all love to shop online. At ideaHacks 2016, my team and I wanted to create something that would positively affect our own experiences with online shopping by improving a shopper's security and awareness of their purchased products.

What it does

Notifi is a smart mat that sits on at your front door. When a package arrives, it sends the owner a message that something has arrived! But more importantly, if the package is removed, the user gets notified as well!

How I built it

Using an Arduino Zero board, Atmel ArduinoWiFiShield101, Load Cells and amplifiers, we created a pressure sensor in the shape of a small rectangular prism (essentially a scale made of cardboard) which is meant to replace the common doormat. Of course, we would've used better material and optimized the shape and size, but all we had was cardboard :)

Challenges I ran into

Being the first hackathon to much of the team (and my first hardware hackathon), ideaHacks 2016 kept us brainstorming for a long period of time trying to come up with something unique using the IoT. Upon finally deciding on our own take of a smart mat, we locked into the idea of sending the user an instant notification. This lead to a tunneled view of using Temboo to call the Gmail API in order to send an email to the user. After spending many hours attempting to fix the errors we encountered, we unfortunately learned that the source of the issues we faced were not things that were under our control. As a result, we looked into using PubNub's calls which allowed us to connect to a server to send and receive messages.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud of our ability to clutch out a completed project despite all the challenges we faced. Our team's dedication to learning allowed us to continue exploring new ideas throughout the event to finally build something that we all believed would be of use to society.

What I learned

I learned a lot about hardware, since I came to the event with no experience with physically hacking and building something creative. It was fairly simple to learn to code for the Arduino, but it was nonetheless a cool experience to learn a new language.

What's next for Notifi

Some ideas we wanted to implement to Notifi but were unable to due to a limited amount of physical resources and time include an email/SMS/push notification that would be sent to a mobile phone (over the PubNub server), a camera or fingerprint sensor for human recognition, and an ultrasonic range finder to check for the mat's position (in case someone may have moved it away from its original location).

Built With

• arduino-zero
• load-cell
• load-cell-amplifier
• pubnub
• wifi-shield-101