AnyPen | Devpost

Inspiration

A friend of ours keeps forgetting to bring a pencil to class and he ends up not being able to take notes. We thought about how convenient it would be if you could turn anything into a pencil.

What it does

AnyPen turns any object into an apple pencil with materials costing only a fraction of the original Apple Pencil. Once the components are attached to the object, it will track what you are writing to create online, hand-written notes.

How we built it

We started and finished

Challenges we ran into

When we first connected the depth sensor to our computer, we had no idea how to communicate with it. It took a 4 am Discord call with a friend to realize that we had to send it messages before it would respond. After that, writing the image parser was pretty straightforward, though we did run into a slight issue where we had trouble syncing the frames.

Originally, we were going to build the hardware parts with an Arduino Nano and the GY521 gyroscope and accelerometer. We were able to get the Yaw, Pitch, and Roll of the device, but that wouldn't give us the change in position, so we scrapped that idea after hours of work. We then switched to Raspberry Pi and a camera to track the position using a stationary object and PyCamera, but we had issues accessing the camera itself which required us to try out multiple libraries and packages to solve the issue.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being able to get and interpret the depth sensor's data, establishing access the camera and detecting the stationary object, calculating its position, and draw based on that.

What we learned

There was a large learning curve regarding the hardware/embedded systems since nobody on our team had worked with either before. We learned a lot about communicating with the depth sensor, and had a lot of fun! Although the Arduino did not work out for what we were doing, we were still able to connect the components on a breadboard and program it to get the acceleration and gyroscopic data.

What's next for AnyPen

Currently, we are tracking movement based on a stationary circular object, a dime. In the future, we'd like to create a more easily accessible and built-in stationary device (possibly a light) that would limit the extra components of the device.