padblocker | Devpost

Inspiration

We wanted to solve the problem of ads and content creator revenue and do it better, and impractically.

What it does

It uses advanced technology such as a piece of fabric and four AA batteries to block ads on your computer screen in real life. When an ad is detected, a motor and Arduino servo would roll down the fabric, effectively covering the ad from sight. Further, totally useful ad statistics are displayed with the extension, such as Nanograms of CO2 Emitted as a result of the motors.

How we built it

We threw together an Arduino, some motors and a motor driver. As for the ad detection, we made a Chrome extension to report the position of the ad to the Arduino. To get the communication going between the Arduino and the extension, we built a web server using Flask which the extension can make POST requests to, as Chrome didn’t support direct serial communication for some reason.

Challenges we ran into

This project actually ended up being more complex than we originally thought! There were many problems we encountered, especially on the hardware side, which we didn't think of in the planning process. For example, we discovered that the natural phenomenon of gravity as well as resistance on the surface of the fabric interfered with the its attempts to move up and down accurately, so we had to mess with time values.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We only short circuited and melted our battery terminals once. :)

On a more serious note, all of us were relatively inexperienced at hardware, so the fact that we could throw this together in 24 hours was pretty nice.