Inspiration
No one likes oversleeping and missing important events. When you're in that drowsy state after waking up, it is all too easy to turn off your alarm and go back to sleep, ignoring any potential repercussions.
What it does
Rooster solves the problem to sleeping through events by allowing your friends to yell at you through a internet-enabled speaker and a web application. Friends can record an audio file through the webapp and the webapp will, upon submission, will blast said audio file into your unsuspecting ears.
How we built it
We used a Particle Photon wired to a speaker to create the internet-enabled speaker. The webapp is built with ruby on rails, and the rails server sends PCM audio to the photon.
Challenges we ran into
Audio files are large, larger if they aren't compressed. The most challenging aspects of this hack were finding a way to record a small enough audio file in the browser such that it wouldn't be too slow to send to the photon, and actually getting the audio data sent to the photon over multiple requests.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Our group is composed of 2 computer scientists and 2 electrical engineers and it was very cool being able to collaborate on a project that played to our different strengths by having both hardware and software components.
What we learned
We learned more about audio files and how to alter their bitrate, channels, etc than we had anticipated.
What's next for Rooster
Many grumpy, grateful friends.
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