Opening Opportunities - 2018
One year after the Opening Opportunities mentoring project in 2017, my team and me decided to apply once again.
This time around, we wanted to learn new things and start working with hardware. Our team composition changed a bit from last year, this time adding two new members from Bucharest. Most of our meetings took place via Skype and after many debates, we finally came up with an idea for our new project.
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"Utility Helper" was going to be a set of sensors connected to an app, that alerted the user whenever any abnormality took place.
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Our mentor invited us to the Microsoft HQ in Bucharest for a brainstorming session, in order to distribute our roles and come up with a work plan for each member of the team.
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The team agreed that the project had three main components: the app itself, the hardware aspect and the overall design.
Me and a couple of other team members already had a bit of experience working with Arduino hardware but we all decided that the ultimate goal was for everyone to learn something new, which lead to assigning the roles for the hardware aspect to the teammates that weren't familiar with Arduino. Of course, we all helped each other since none of us were actual experts. At the end of the day, everyone learnes something new.
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The final set of sensors consisted of a heat sensor, a humidity sensor and gas leak detector, a movement sensor (in case of a break-in) and a sensor that alerted the user whenever the garbage bin was full (which was actually the idea that started this project!).
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The application for the phone was mainly designed in Photoshop CS6. A teammate and me were in charge of the user interface, which meant that we had to design the menus for each sensor and to animate several assets, like the thermometer bar for the heat sensor.
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After both the sensors and the app were ready to be connected, we started the testing period. Some of the code had to be adjusted but in the end, we managed to connect the two.
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After that, we had to shoot our promotional videos. Unfortunately, we didn't manage to finish everything that we had in mind. For the final stage of our project, we wanted to 3D print a casing for the sensors.
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In the end, I believe that Utility Helper was a successful project and that our ultimate goal, which was to learn as much as possible, was achieved.
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