Valen-time

Inspiration

The movie - "Love Alarm" -- which tells the story of a city in which people's love is discovered via digital tech. Your "love" alarm will ring when you and another person mutually like each other. While we can't build all of it in our current time period, we can definitely build the building blocks required to achieve our vision!

What it does

For this Valentines day, we want to help you get out of your comfort zone and meet your special someone. We realize that this is super hard during the pandemic because we don’t meet people too often. Using dating apps is too boring and not fun. However, we think that this shouldn’t be a reason to not venture out.

“Love Alarm” is our hybrid -- software & hardware -- solution to help you find that special someone. To use love alarm, all you have to do is sign up on the app.

Once you sign up by giving your name, age, email, , all you have to do is wear our watch app which links to your identity.

Once you setup an alarm, the watch will automatically be on the lookout when new people join the service and are a good fit for you.

With love alarm, you’ll find love as it comes :)

How we built it

The Valen.time watch is built using an ESP32 at its core. This powerful dual core MCU paired with freeRTOS lets us keep the user profile updated in the background while displaying rich graphics on the 240x240 IPS panel. The ESP32 also includes WiFi and a low energy bluetooth radio that can be paired with a phone for data transfers like GPS location.

Challenges we ran into

While freeRTOS makes multithreading easier with tasks, we still had issues with some tasks blocking others causing catastrophic crashes. For example, the task that fetches the local time from the internet interferes with the JSON get/put task that keeps the watch up to date. These interferences would normally be abstracted away and resolved, but had to be manually resolved in our case.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Working remotely and actually completing a working prototype :)

What we learned

Working across timezones is a challenge! Remote working solutions make it easier. Splitting tasks parallelly by skillset and sequentially by timezone can allow work to happen effectively.