Depresso

Inspiration

Our inspiration was our own need for social interaction.

What it does

The robot can be controled remotely by a user using a phone. It can move and it can grab objects using a gripper. The robot is also dotated with a raspberry pi connected to a speaker and can say jokes that are collected from the subredit /jokes. In moments of inactivity the robot randomly says thoughts from the subredit /shower-toughts. All it's features are aimed to help the user deal easier with beeing self isolated alone. In moments of complete silence and boredom the robot can bring a litle joy and happines to the user. The jokes are meant to entertain while the random thoughts are meant to give "food for mind". With all these feaures combined the robot help the state of mind of the user.

How we built it

The project consists of three parts: front end, backend and hardware.

The front end consistes of an mobile crossplatform application designed using React Native. The app send commands to the server which puts them in a pipeline for the raspberry pi to receive them when ready.

The server was coded in go-lang as a rest api and hosted on Digital Ocean. It stores all commands from the phone and uses the geddit api to get content from reddit subredits.

On the hardware part we decided to build a movable robot with a tank chasis and a servo-gripper. On the robot there is mounted a raspberry pi and a speaker, as well as an arduino with a DC-motors driver. The raspberry pi plays any sound using a speaker and "espeak" with "omxplayer". If it receives any commands of moments it sends it down to the arduino thru the Serial Port , which then exectues the commands.

Challenges we ran into

As we split the work in 3 parts each one of us had his own challange. For the frontend there was delay from a problem occured with git. On the server-side the biggest problem was deploying the app. For the hardware, the biggest challange was to make use of limited resources that wouldn't usualy fit together and would be to old to keep the pace. For example a significant delay was created by having only a first generation raspberry pi and no wifi module which created multiple problems.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The biggest accomplishment for us is the fact that the delay from the moment the users presses the button to the robot doing the action is almost not observable, especially considering the fact that the hardware is outdated.

What we learned

We all learned how great a project can go if the work is split according to each one's specialization. In this project we managed to each create our own part and in the end it worked as intended. Also, we each learned new valuable skills in programming and organisation.

What's next for Depresso

The next step would be to standardise all components of the system and making it into a full fledged project on maker.io so people can build their own depresso and other variants.