1. Principles and practices¶
It’s time to start defining my final project idea!
Checklist:
- Sketch your final project idea/s
- Describe briefly what it will do and who will use it.
I spent several days brainstorming ideas for the final project. I tried to identify tedious everyday activities that could be automated… but nothing interesting occurred to me.
In the search of inspiration I explored projects from students of past years and bookmarked the ones that I liked the most:
- B.R.E.A.T.H.E - Lorena Delgado
- Weather forecast - Baptiste Lardais
- Calorventus - Harm Vanvugt
- Hello Happy Plant - Blanca Rosas
- Word Watch Clock - Harnek Gulati
- Sensitive Dog - Ola Mirecka
- Dozo Dozo - Natsuka Kamei
- Mirru in/out - Pamela Arana
- The Anti Soggy Spoon - Arnar Daði Þórisson
- The introvert Light - Rutger Oomkes
- Fab-360 - Tapan Betai
Additionally I’ve found a lot of interesting projects on makenzine.com and instructables.com.
Then, after having seen hundreds of projects and with a little help from my wife the final project idea appeared.
What will it do?¶
My project idea consists in building a device for showing the status of online orders. This device is intended to be placed in a visible place in the home so it should have a nice design.
If the current order changes its status, the clock hands will move to reflect that and the device will emit a sound to call the user’s atention. In this way, users wouldn’t have to check their smartphones every minute to check their orders statuses.
Considerations:
- SMS, Push and Email notifications should be somehow obtained and parsed in order to show the status change events.
- Evaluate the possibility of tracking many orders at the same time by adding more hands to the clock.
- It should be easy to add or remove labels (different plaftorms and services work with different status sets).
Who will use it?¶
Mainly people who does online shopping frequently.
What will it look like?¶
This idea was inspired by the Weasley Family Clock (shown on one of the scenes of the Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets movie). I want a similar design for my project.
I’ve found similar projects, but none were used to track online orders:
- The Stata Clock: Find Loved Ones At-A-Glance
- Weasley Whereabouts Clock: An IoT Family Location Tracker
- Weather forecast - Baptiste Lardais