Guard 🪿 Goose

Inspiration

Have you ever found yourself torn between watching over your precious study materials or getting that desperate caffeine fix at the campus café? Or that much needed washroom break? Or perhaps you’ve experienced the paranoia of leaving your study nook behind, wondering if a potential intruder will snatch away your valuable laptop and iPad? OR you had to leave your hack space to pick up more hardware items at HTN. If so, you’re not alone!

What it does 🚨👀

When you think GoOsE you think PROTECTIVE, SCARY, AND LOUD. What better than having your own personal Guard Goose?

Guard Goose watches over your study space for you, while you take a much-deserved lil’ break, with 3 key features:

1) Easy to control app to turn on and off the Guard Goose. 2) Suspicious Surroundings Detection: If someone goes up close to your computer, the Guard Goose will activate its red laser eyes warning the thief to stay away 💥 You will also get a notification on the app. 3) Motion Detection: If someone goes so far to move your laptop, not only will Guard Goose activate its laser lights, it will also start honking, letting everyone around know that we have a thief on our hands. You will AGAIN get a notification on the app.

It effortlessly attaches to the back of your upright laptop as a cute, unassuming little study buddy (until, of course, it’s not).

Guard Goose offers you peace of mind by autonomously ensuring the security of their personal belongings during study sessions, particularly in situations when no one else can watch it for you or you feel too anxious to ask others.

How we built it 💻

We used a time of flight sensor to detect when someone (aka the intruder) stays suspiciously close to your laptop and belongings. A 9 DOF absolute orientation sensor was used to detect when your laptop is moved. For both sensors, analog data was read from an ESP32 microcontroller using Arduino. We wrote functions in C++ to clean and analyze sensor data from both sensors, and used serial communication to pass information from the Arduino to the Python-based app. 3D goose parts were created using CAD software, and then 3D printed. They formed the perfect enclosure for our hardware components, and were glued around the circuitry to form the goose body and head. We built the frontend of our user interactive application using HTML and CSS, while the backend was built in python on Taipy.

Challenges we ran into

Our speaker broke on us, so we ended up having to modify the frequencies of a buzzer in order to create that distinctive “honking” sound. Another challenge was integrating the Arduino code with the Python application, which required looking through loads of stack overflow to fix all the bugs. Also, it was our first time using the TaiPy python library, so that led to some app page rendering issues (none that couldn’t be solved with some documentation though! 🤪).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is many of our first hardware hacks, and the integration of both hardware and software Since we are all from different engineering disciplines at McMaster (software, mechatronics, and electrical), a hack that combined all these disciplines seamlessly into a single product was cool to see from ideation to finished product.

What's next for Guard Goose

Guard Goose wants to make sure that your unsupervised study stuff stays just the way it was AND EVERY SNEAKY STUFF STEALER is reprimanded of their actions. One way we could advance our product is recruit the laptop webcam to take a picture of the intruder.

Just like geese have good memory, Guard Goose will too!

Built With

• accelerometer
• arduino
• c++
• esp32
• inventor
• python
• taipy
• timeofflightsensor