Spray Plus | Devpost

spray plus
banana for scale
spray head
arduino detail

Star us on Github! https://github.com/themichaelyang/spray-plus

Inspiration

Dang, I wish there was some way to stay on task so I can an A+ (sprAy plus) in my classes. Everyday, college students like us get distracted from our work by exquisite media. To combat this growing epidemic, we looked at feline training methodology for inspiration.

What it does

We present Spray Plus, a top of the line human obedience conditioning system. It's a Chrome browser extension that monitors your active tabs to make sure you're not straying from your studies. When it detects some bad behavior (Youtube, Facebook, etc.), it activates our state of the art spray system, hosing down any procrastinator-to-be, getting them back on track for an A+.

How we built it

We built our application in Javascript and HTML for the Chrome extension client. This client communicates to a local web server using socket.io whenever it notices browsing activity on distracting websites. The Node.js, socket.io server communicates over serial to an Arduino board using Firmata, actuating the servo and spraying the user.

The spraying mechanism consists of a servo mounted to the back of a spray bottle with metal components, hot glue, and rubber bands attached to the spraying handle.

Challenges we ran into

Building it was very time consuming because we did not have the correct parts to connect the metal components to the servo in a sturdy way. Unfortunately, we did not have access to power tools so we had to improvise by hand drilling holes into the plastic mounts.

For the Chrome extension, since we were communicating with hardware which was not accessible to Chrome we had to use a local web server-based solution. We also had difficulty using the Chrome API since we were using it in a unconventional manner. There were also some bugs with Firmata.