Brickhack 4 IoT Winner

The original submission and nitty gritty details can be found on Devpost.

I worked with Zack Banack in a 24 hour sleepless hackathon over the weekend. You can see all of his wonderful front end skills at https://zackbanack.com. The whole project was made in 24 hours, so many design decisions were based on functionality instead of security. It’s not like IoT devices are known for their security anyways.

This was the final product presented to the judges.

The complete project

The guts of the cases

The devices were designed as a set. The first device, the one in green and orange casing, is designed as a sensor for laundry machines. The device is placed inside or behind a laundry machine in order to prevent tampering and still be able to feel the machine’s vibration. It contains an accelerometer that senses small vibrations in the machine to determine its state: ‘in use’ or ‘available’. The second device, the one with the white case, is essentially a desk toy that communicates the status to you via flashy lights. The cases are simply for looks, and to help differentiate between the two types of devices.

Behold, here is a quick demo of the devices.

Each device contains a Raspberry Pi 3 for networking and service management. The display device also contains a teensy 3.2 used to communicate to the neopixel ring via I²C. I could have done this from the Pi but I wanted the challenge. To communicate between the Pi and teensy I used four pins to send a four digit binary number that chose the led pattern being displayed.

As for the app interface it was made in React Native. You will have to check out Zack’s blog post to learn more about it, but he made this GIF of the progression he made throughout the competition. To learn more, read his blog post here.

Amazing GIF of the app interface progression by Zack Banack