Inspiration
We were initially inspired by the industry use cases of QNX products, particularly in the automotive and manufacturing spaces. After grappling with a myriad of ideas, we were reminded of a particular video of a hot dog and a table saw, and wanted to push the QNX system to that limit for safety-critical applications.
What it does
When a circuit is completed (meaning that a human worker is in risk of serious injury) an interrupt signal is sent and the controller device nearly immediately stops the moving blade, protecting the worker.
How we built it
We leveraged the GPIO pins on our Pi unit to create a circuit and power a moving blade (a tiny computer fan). Initially we prototyped in Python before moving onto C. After getting the program working in C we benchmarked and experimentally optimized the code and hardware configuration.
Challenges we ran into
Embedded systems was a new frontier for all of us, who share software and data backgrounds. Initially we wanted to make a mini self-driving car, but we ran into many issues in the design and experimentation phase that led us to investigate other use cases. Furthermore we ran into some issues configuring our development environments that caused us to lose significant amounts of time and decide to reduce the scope of our deliverable.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud that the latency in our system was low enough that we failed to capture it in slow-motion.
What we learned
We expanded our horizons in working with hardware, embedded systems, the C programming language, real-time computing environments, and working around limitations.
What's next for Safety Switch
The next steps for the safety switch involve iterating on the switch mechanism itself. The current implementation is optimized for speed and does not provide a realistic facsimile of the human's flesh completing the switch circuit.
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