Inspiration
We often pass by a room, office or a gathering space and wonder if it's available for the next couple of minutes and whether we can quickly book it for a few minutes, for an on the spot gathering kind of thing. Some places have built their own in-house systems to provide such functionality, but we wanted to build an affordable, portable, configurable and easy to use system that fits any space.
What it does
The device does just that. With a simple interface that provides the user with information about the room's availability through a set of coloured LED lamps, and enabling the user to quickly book the space with a button's press.
How we built it
We used Arduino 101 board, Grove Starter Kit and Grove UART WiFi module to build Ooda. We implemented our software and WiFi module's firmware (based on ESP8266 Arduino Core) that enables us to securely communicate with online calendaring systems.
Challenges we ran into
We encountered few challenges that we learned from, such us picking the most appropriate WiFi module for the job and updating it's firmware. We had challenges with multi-threading and syncing the board's time, while managing the program's memory and performance.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Managing to implement a smart IoT device using minimum resources available
What's next for Ooda
There's a lot of potential for Ooda, for example the near future vision includes features such as voice commands to modify a quick booking and supporting other types of calendaring systems beside Google Calendar. Voice commands would keep the user interface simple, supplementing the quick booking feature.
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