Mother Board | Devpost

Inspiration

Our team looked back on the long gaming sessions we've had throughout the years, noting that, while fun, they often served as quite the annoyance for our parents and roommates alike. So we thought, how about we create a machine to solve the ever-present problem of noisy gamers? Hence, the Mother Board was born.

What it does

The Mother Board detects sound in real time to tell you when you're being too loud. An LED matrix displays a happy or sad face depending on your volume. Additionally, if you go above the noise threshold enough times, a customizable message will play, letting you know to keep it down. If you continue to be loud after that, a hand comes down to slap you. On the flip-side, be quiet for long enough and you are rewarded with a dispensed treat.

How we built it

The Mother Board was built by connecting a multitude of components to one central Arduino Uno. Some components include, a microphone, speaker, LED display, servo, and more. We then implemented each component using the Arduino IDE, connecting their functionalities with functions and global variables.

Challenges we ran into

A main challenge we faced was implementing the motor into our idea. We wanted to fix some sort of "slapping device" to it, yet faced trouble as the motor itself often couldn't support its weight. Additionally, affixing the device to the motor proved to be troublesome as adhesives like tape or hot glue were either not sticky enough or caused problems with the spinning.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being new to the hardware space, we're all quite proud of seeing our vision through to the end, and getting each of our desired components to work. Some components we are especially proud of include the motor and LED matrix display as they caused us the most problems.

What we learned

In general, we learned a lot about basic hardware in a short time. We learned how to wire up components to the breadboard and main Arduino, as well as also controlling functionality via backend code.

What's next for Mother Board

In the future, we want the Mother Board to be a fully polished product made with quality material instead of just the cardboard prototype we have right now.