Study Focus

Inspiration

We were inspired by the Pomodoro method, wanting to implement a way for us, within our own computers, to ensure that we're staying on track during work times. We hoped to create something that would be useful to students in particular, specifically procrastinators who need reminders to stay focussed on tasks.

What it does

The application runs locally on your machine. The application calibrates the edges of your screen, along with a banned list of programs, and if your eyes stray from the screen or a banned program is launched during allotted work times, it blacks out your screen temporarily to catch your attention. We greatly understand the importance of breaks when studying, so we also schedule (and give the user the option to configure) breaks in their study periods. During these breaks, the screen is temporarily blacked out and if you look towards the screen during this period, a reminder will be shown.

How we built it

We built it on Python, creating a GUI using TKinter and the GazeTracking repo for eye tracking.

Challenges we ran into

The challenges largely had to do with TKInter - it wasn't the greatest fit for the job, but we had experience with it to create a GUI within Python. This, coupled with having to get running processes depending on OS made for a very challenging 24 hours.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to integrate eye-tracking technology into a somewhat viable and very useful application for lots of us, which was very exciting for all of us.

What we learned

A lot of things - version control is actually really important, TKInter is a massive pain to work with, don't try to type '\Users' inside a string in Python without escaping it, don't try to run Numpy with Python 3.9 - and a lot more.

What's next for Study Focus

The code needs a serious, deep refactoring. Variable names are a mess, there's a weird mix of OOP and global functions, and TKInter in general.

Built With

• dlib
• python