Screen Hero

Inspiration

We came into this hackathon with a preset idea of creating Time and Place, an app that facilitates social interaction. We eventually ran into numerous unsolvable issues concerning permissions and android phones, which discouraged us somewhat. However, at around 2 AM, we had the idea to create an app that lets a user create their own screen savers based on a top-down view of mathematical functions. This is how Screen Hero was born.

What it does

The software we ended up creating is an application that enables you to create your own screen savers with a top-down view of mathematical functions that determine separate RGB values. Using this, a user is able to generate an infinite variety of cool screensavers.

How we built it

We wrote it in C#.

Challenges we ran into

We came into this hackathon with a preset plan to create an ionic app called Time and Place that would use proximity sensing and geolocation to facilitate social interaction by automatically disabling phones in social situations. This ambitious app would use PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, Ionic, Angular Javascript, and Android Java. Unfortunately, we ran into challenges at every turn. Ionic did not work on the Android we were given. Ionic was unable to run Android Java so we had to write our own plugin. After Android update 4.2, non-SYSTEM apps were unable to change system settings unless they were rooted. We were unable to secure permission to root the phone. The combination of these factors caused us to realize that this project was not going to work.

At 1AM, our project fell apart. The greatest challenge we faced was trying to come together to continue trying to create a product despite our discouraging start, but in the end we came together in the face of initial failure to create a product that we are proud of.

Other challenges we faced were trying to output a series of images as a video file using AForge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Starting a project at 2:00 AM, the fact that we were able to complete one at all and that we were able to remain motivated enough to continue working after our initial failure is something that we are very proud of. After numerous attempts and different ways of going after our Android social idea, Time And Place, we thought we weren’t going to make a project. In order to be able to successfully create something, we had to make something new. We were devastated. We had to brainstorm a variety of ideas, and we even began working on each individually starting our own projects to try and test anything that could possibly work. But despite these challenges, we eventually came together to create a working project that we are really happy with.

What we learned

Some of the issues we had with our Android idea was that we were working with systems we were unfamiliar with. We haven’t worked very much with Android, and for some of us it was the first time working with those languages. When we were working, our unfamiliarity led to many of the different aspects of our ideas not working. Something that we learned for future hackathons and projects is that we should know in advance exactly how we will go about our project, in order to ensure that we can succeed without having to reboot during the middle of the event.

Additionally, we also got started to understand new languages and got more familiar with others. We learned that about the workings of Androids, such as that permissions are unable to be changed unless the phone is rooted or the app is either a parental control app or a system app. We became much more familiar with a large variety of languages including PHP, HTML, C# and JavaScript.

We also learned to persevere and never give up hope. Despite the large setback of losing 8 hours to an impossible project, we continued trying to create a product, and in the end we succeeded.

What's next for Screen Hero

Adding in more functionality for different functions and adding in more functions in the UI to generate different kinds of screen savers, and saving the screensaver in video format.

Built With

• c#