Inspiration
I've thought in the past, how would a deaf person know if there is a fire alarm going off in their house? There might be some devices that vibrates the whole bed, but, what if they are away from their bed? Like washing the dishes, reading in the living room, or distracted? As far as I know, there is no such device or product that is able to alert a deaf person if their fire alarm is going off.
What it does
The device alerts the deaf person of a fire alarm going off by picking up the frequency of the fire alarm. If the device detects a fire alarm going off, it will proceed to vibrate, letting the user know that the alarm is active. Not only that, the device also has a piezo buzzer that gets activated by the user by pressing a button. Once the button is pressed, the buzzer will buzz for 30 seconds along with an LED light flashing.
How we built it
I build the device using Arduino and some components, such as, a sound sensor and a piezo buzzer. I first designed the schematics for the device and proceeds to gather the necessary materials. I then proceeded to programming the device by researching different types of codes and combining them all together to fit the needs for the device. Once the programming is completed, we proceeded to transfer the pieces from a breadboard to a soldering board.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into multiple challenges on the first day while trying to develop the device. Since this is my first hackathon, I wasn't sure what to do, therefore, I wasn't able to plan out accordingly, wasting the whole first day doing nothing. The most troublesome challenge I ran into was the hardware. During a meeting with my teammates on the first day, the idea for the device shifted to something else, which required more hardware parts. Since the MLH hardware lab has limited parts, we decided to create the initial idea instead.
Since we weren't sure how to proceed with the limited hardware parts, my team was on idle. Then we started losing numbers. In the end, only 2 of us remained out of 4.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
After finally trying to figure out how to create an algorithm to generate the necessary data from the sound sensor, we were able to find the FFT(Fast Fourier Transform) algorithm made for Arduino. After tweaking it around, the sound sensor finally was able to pick up and differentiate background noise (crowd noises) and the fire alarm noise.
What we learned
We learned that it is sometimes a good idea to stick to 1 idea and look for a workaround for it if you have time constraints.
What's next for Arduino Fire Alarm
I see a real value onto the device itself which can be extended to a wide audience rather than just for deaf people. If we had the correct equipment and parts, we could've made the device several steps ahead of the original idea.
I see real value in it during emergency situations, such as, earthquakes, search and rescue, emergency response, etc.
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