Inspiration
With everything being done virtually these days, including this hackathon, we spend a lot of time at our desks and behind screens. It's more important now than ever before to take breaks from time to time, but it's easy to get lost in our activities. Studies show that breaks increases over overall energy and productivity, and decreases exhaustion and fatigue. If only we had something to help us from forgetting..
What it does
The screen connected to the microcontrollers tells you when it's time to give your eyes a break, or to move around a bit to get some exercise. Currently, it tells you to take a 20-second break for your eyes for every 20 minutes of sitting, and a few minutes of break to exercise for every hour of sitting.
How we built it
The hardware includes a RPi 3B+, aluminum foil contacts underneath the chair cushion, a screen, and wires to connect all these components. The software includes the RPi.GPIO library for reading the signal from the contacts and the tkinter library for the GUI displayed on the screen.
Challenges we ran into
Some python libraries were written for Python 2 and others for Python 3, so we took some time to resolve these dependency issues. The compliant structure underneath the cushion had to be a specific size and rigidity to allow the contacts to move appropriately when someone gets up/sits down on the chair. Finally, the contacts were sometimes inconsistent in the signals they sent to the microcontrollers.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We built this system in a few hours and were successful in not spending all night or all day working on the project!
What we learned
Tkinter takes some time to learn to properly utilize its features, and hardware debugging needs to be a very thorough process!
What's next for iBreak
Other kinds of reminders could be implemented later like reminder to drink water, or some custom exercises that involve sit up/down repeatedly.
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