What if you forget the keys and you live alone? How can you get back into your house? How might we help people be aware and avoid forgetting important things when leaving their home, work, etc.?
At the beginning my idea was inspired by how sometimes, we leave our homes in a rush and forget to bring stuff with us. Forgetting an apple? Ok, you will survive. But what if you forget the keys and you live alone? How can you get back into your house?
Inspired by this issue, I wanted to design a prototype with Arduino to build a sensor that might alert people when leaving the house to remember to bring their keys. So, the idea started by thinking of placing some sort of sensor on the door. The sensor could alert people with sound or light.
Inspiration
If we think about the traffic lights, for example, we all know green means go, red means stop. Therefore, by using this cues, I think people might connect with the idea of being remembered or alerted through the use of lights. In addition to the previous comment, I also thought about the activity that people engage with when they leave and enter their homes, which includes turning on and off the lights. Therefore, a key sensor that might potentially do this or help with this task, can be beneficial for enhancing this mundane activity.
The first prototype I developed was informed and reacted to a magnet placed in the key, so then the sensors will react to sensing the magnet. I wanted to learn how to build the physical interface using the breadboard and connectors to be able to react to the input from the magnet. I learned that the sensor I needed for magnets is called “Hall Effect” and after that, I needed to build the physical connections. In addition to the physical component, I needed to design and create the code that will inform the sensor to react to the contact with the magnet, and by reacting, activating a feedback. I decided I was going to start with a feedback based on light.
Learning how to code on Arduino, or in any other software, is like learning a language. It requires time to understand what things and words mean, and I think that’s the challenge. You don’t learn to speak German, for example, from one day to the other. However, understanding this matter opens up possibilities to play around with some existing codes and trying to figure out the composition of the characters and characters + words. The prototype I developed was informed and reacted to a magnet placed in the key, so then the sensors will react to sensing the magnet.
Second Iteration
For the second prototype, I added a servo motor to represent the door knob. The idea was to be linked to the responsiveness of the key sensor (Hall Effect) in a similar way to the responsiveness of the light, therefore it will lock the door once you are inside your house, at the same time that it turns on the lights. The opposite thing will happen when you leave the house. The sensor activates the response for not sensing the key magnet and in response it turns off the lights in the house and locks the doors as well.
Thus, people might save valuable minutes when leaving their homes in a rush, plus having the certainty that the lights would be off and the doors locked, ensuring safety and environmental responsibility.
Finally, I develop a fun way to visualize the data being gathered, like for example, how many times someone comes in and out a door.
How it started? Concept development
IO Diagram
