Window

Inspiration

We wanted to make dorms and residence halls into the interconnected communities they can be, by putting a Window in each door — a device that allows residents to organically interact with each other while still retaining their privacy and personal space.

What it does

A Window lets other residents see who's currently in a dorm and who's currently out, as well as leave audio messages for individual residents. It does this without requiring any apps, user accounts, or power cables.

How we built it

Window uses Bluetooth to identify a given device as a person's marker. When that device is in range, the person is considered in the dorm. When they leave, it displays them as out. Users are also able to record audio messages for those who are out, which can be sent to the Internet and pushed to roommates' phones.

Challenges I ran into

In developing Window, we pushed our ESP32 microcontroller to the limits. We had to juggle 540KB of memory between the WiFi stack, the Bluetooth stack, and audio recording.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The ESP32 isn't well suited for audio recording -- it has a small amount of memory, as well as a slow analog-to-digital converter. However, we were able to write a function that takes in raw values from the microphone at infinitesimal intervals, and formats them into a .wav file which can be sent over the network to a server.

What I learned

We learned how the Wave audio protocol works on a binary level, as well as how to integrate multiple real-time components with an embedded system.

What's next for Window

We'd like to make Window fully self-powered with larger solar panels specialized for indoor light, and an efficient e-ink display. This final step will allow Window to be a fully seamless device which requires no maintenance.

Built With

• 3dprinting
• arduino
• esp32