Smart Pen

What it does

There's nothing quite like writing something real. But whenever you write on paper, whiteboard, or stone plate, you're giving up the convenience of digital notes. Smart pen eliminates that tradeoff. Write on paper. Record every pen stroke online. Then, OCR, summarize with an LLM, or share with friends.

How we built it

ESP32 + MPU6050 + pain

Challenges we ran into

Writing requires precisely estimating the position of the pen -- e.g. dead reckoning. Dead reckoning is hard. It requires finding the orientation of the pen to accurately account for the effect of gravity on the accelerometer before calculating position, an approach which accumulates error and drift. With only a 6 dof IMU (inertial measurement unit), we do not have enough data to manage error.

Built With

• c
• esp32
• python