Sol Persona

Sol Persona outside of the mask
Sol Person while mic is picking up sound

Inspiration

Masks have become a part of our daily lives in the past year due to Covid-19. The whole Covid-19 situation has been quite gloomy, so we decided to create a mask that would light up your day in more ways than one.

What it does

Our mask utilizes a microphone sensor to display whether the mask wearer is talking or not.

How we built it

Using an Arduino Pro Micro as the main micro-controller we connected it to the LED matrix, microphone sensor, and the FSR (force sensitive resistor). The data from the microphone sensor was used to create an animation to switch between a circle and line, which mirrors the way people talk. To turn on or off the LED matrix the FSR was used as a switch. With a ESP32, we set up a local website that can communicate with the ESP32. We then used SoftwareSerial to allow the ESP32 to communicate with the Arduino Pro Micro. With this, the humidity sensor can relay information to the ESP32 that will therefore calculate the mask life.

Challenges we ran into

One of the challenges we ran into was using the Arduino Pro Micro. We built the Sol Persona by testing components on the Arduino Mega and Arduino Uno, however, everything took up too much room so we had to transfer everything onto a single Arduino Pro Micro and the ESP32.

Another major challenge we ran into was trying to use Bluetooth to communicate with the mask wearer's devices. We made an app using Android Studio however, the phone continuously lost connection with the ESP32. We had to make a late night call to switch over to wifi.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to be able to help people reveal their inner persona through LEDs.

What we learned

During our 48 hours, we managed to learn a lot about getting Arduinos to run with the sensors we had. The importance of looking at the datasheets for connections became apparent right off the bat.

What's next for Sol Persona

We would like to change the battery source in the future to support button cell batteries instead of the big clunky 9V battery. One other minimization we could do is reduce part cost we could also reduce all the operations done on the Arduino Pro Micro, but it has limited documentation and help so it would require more time. The last cool function we want to add next is the ability to add custom LED arrangements onto the mask.