Knock Knock is an IoT device that is able to detect a door knock, take a video of the knocker and send a mobile notification to the room tenant letting them know of their existence.
Knock Knock consists three parts; the Arduino part, the PCDuino relay and the phone. The Arduino portion consists of a camera with a servo mechanism (that will move the camera) as well as a piezo element that will detect a door knock with the help of a signal amplifier, both of which are attached to an Arduino Mega.
The PCDuino portion is responsible for pushing the notification and video stream to the Android phone once a knock is detected. Finally, the mobile phone is responsible for listening for the packet from the PCDuino.
As for what went wrong, basically everything did. Getting Knock Knock up and running was rather challenging. Initially, we had looked into making a black bean turret that will be steered by an Occulus DK2 and fired at the flick of a Pebble Watch. Sadly, the person who was able to run the DK2 on their PC vanished, leaving us to find another idea Once we settled on Knock Knock, even more issues emerged. Firstly, the piezo element that would pick up a knock were difficult to work with due to its high sensitivity. Secondly, setting up the PCDuino took some time despite turning it on and off numerous times. Thirdly, finding a way to send a signal from the Arduino to the phone was far beyond the scope of what any one of us had worked with. And fourthly (not finally), even though there was a way to send data packets from the PCDuino, Android Studio didn't feel like receiving them.
Given how stressful it was to set up Knock Knock was, we consider the fact that the computers and windows around our workspace remained intact as our greatest accomplishment. Asides from that, being able to come from absolutely nothing to a tolerable of something in the space of 36 hours in spite of the novel challenge as something to brag about.
We learned that 1) Android is nasty 2) The Power of Collaboration as well as a lot of stuff relating to hardware as well as the Android Developer Environment, which is terrible.
Next in line for Knock Knock is putting it on our doors! One of us was bad at answering the door and instead of turning down the volume, he saw it as appropriate to make an entire three piece set-up loaded on caffine in under 36 hours.
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