## Inspiration

Fall lab and design bay cleanout leads to some pretty interesting things being put out at the free tables. In this case, we were drawn in by a motorized Audi Spyder car. And then, we saw the Neurosity Crown headsets, and an idea was born. A single late night call among team members, excited about the possibility of using a kiddy car for something bigger was all it took. Why can't we learn about cool tech and have fun while we're at it?

Spyder is a way we can control cars with our minds. Use cases include remote rescue, non able-bodied individuals, warehouse, and being extremely cool.

## What it does

Spyder uses the Neurosity Crown to take the brainwaves of an individual, train an AI model to detect and identify certain brainwave patterns, and output them as a recognizable output to humans. It's a dry brain-computer interface (BCI) which means electrodes are placed against the scalp to read the brain's electrical activity. By taking advantage of these non-invasive method of reading electrical impulses, this allows for greater accessibility to neural technology.

Collecting these impulses, we are then able to forward these commands to our Viam interface. Viam is a software platform that allows you to easily put together smart machines and robotic projects. It completely changed the way we coded this hackathon. We used it to integrate every single piece of hardware on the car. More about this below! :)

## How we built it

### Mechanical

The manual steering had to be converted to automatic. We did this in SolidWorks by creating a custom 3D printed rack and pinion steering mechanism with a motor mount that was mounted to the existing steering bracket. Custom gear sizing was used for the rack and pinion due to load-bearing constraints. This allows us to command it with a DC motor via Viam and turn the wheel of the car, while maintaining the aesthetics of the steering wheel.

### Hardware

A 12V battery is connected to a custom soldered power distribution board. This powers the car, the boards, and the steering motor. For the DC motors, they are connected to a Cytron motor controller that supplies 10A to both the drive and steering motors via pulse-width modulation (PWM).
A custom LED controller and buck converter PCB stepped down the voltage from 12V to 5V for the LED under glow lights and the Raspberry Pi 4. The Raspberry Pi 4 uses the Viam SDK (which controls all peripherals) and connects to the Neurosity Crown for vision software controlling for the motors. All the wiring is custom soldered, and many parts are custom to fit our needs.

### Software

Viam was an integral part of our software development and hardware bringup. It significantly reduced the amount of code, testing, and general pain we'd normally go through creating smart machine or robotics projects. Viam was instrumental in debugging and testing to see if our system was even viable and to quickly check for bugs. The ability to test features without writing drivers or custom code saved us a lot of time. An exciting feature was how we could take code from Viam and merge it with a Go backend which is normally very difficult to do. Being able to integrate with Go was very cool - usually have to do python (flask + SDK). Being able to use Go, we get extra backend benefits without the headache of integration!
Additional software that we used was python for the keyboard control client, testing, and validation of mechanical and electrical hardware. We also used JavaScript and node to access the Neurosity Crown, Neurosity SDK and Kinesis API to grab trained AI signals from the console. We then used websockets to port them over to the Raspberry Pi to be used in driving the car.

## Challenges we ran into

Using the Neurosity Crown was the most challenging. Training the AI model to recognize a user's brainwaves and associate them with actions didn't always work. In addition, grabbing this data for more than one action per session was not possible which made controlling the car difficult as we couldn't fully realise our dream.
Additionally, it only caught fire once - which we consider to be a personal best. If anything, we created the world's fastest smoke machine.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of being able to complete a full mechatronics system within our 32 hours. We iterated through the engineering design process several times, pivoting multiple times to best suit our hardware availabilities and quickly making decisions to make sure we'd finish everything on time. It's a technically challenging project - diving into learning about neurotechnology and combining it with a new platform - Viam, to create something fun and useful.

## What we learned

Cars are really cool! Turns out we can do more than we thought with a simple kid car.
Viam is really cool! We learned through their workshop that we can easily attach peripherals to boards, use and train computer vision models, and even use SLAM! We spend so much time in class writing drivers, interfaces, and code for peripherals in robotics projects, but Viam has it covered. We were really excited to have had the chance to try it out!
Neurotech is really cool! Being able to try out technology that normally isn’t available or difficult to acquire and learn something completely new was a great experience.

## What's next for Spyder

* Backflipping car + wheelies
* Fully integrating the Viam CV for human safety concerning reaction time
* Integrating Adhawk glasses and other sensors to help determine user focus and control
During the COVID-19 pandemic, time spent at home, time spent not exercising, and time spent alone has been at an all time high. This is why, we decided to introduce FITNER to the other fitness nerds like ourselves who struggle to find others to participate in exercise with. As we all know that it is easier to stay healthy, and happy with friends.

We created Fitner as a way to help you find friends to go hiking with, play tennis or even go bowling with! It can be difficult to practice the sport that you love when none of your existing friends are interested, and you do not have the time commitment to join a club. Fitner solves this issue by bridging the gap between fitness nerds who want to reach their potential but don't have the community to do so.

Fitner is a mobile application built with React Native for an iOS and Android front-end, and Google Cloud / Firebase as the backend. We were inspired by the opportunity to use Google Cloud platforms in our application, so we decided to do something we had never done before, which was real-time communication. Although it was our first time working with real-time communication, we found ourselves, in real-time, overtaking the challenges that came along with it. We are very proud of our work ethic, our resulting application and dedication to our first ever hackathon.

Future implementations of our application can include public chat rooms that users may join and plan public sporting events with, and a more sophisticated algorithm which would suggest members of the community that are at a similar skill and fitness goals as you. With FITNER, your fitness goals will be met easily and smoothly and you will meet lifelong friends on the way!
## Inspiration

snore or get pourd on yo pores
Coming into grade 12, the decision of going to a hackathon at this time was super ambitious. We knew coming to this hackathon we needed to be full focus 24/7. Problem being, we both procrastinate and push things to the last minute, so in doing so we created a project to help us

## What it does

It's a 3 stage project which has 3 phases to get the our attention. In the first stage we use a voice command and text message to get our own attention. If I'm still distracted, we commence into stage two where it sends a more serious voice command and then a phone call to my phone as I'm probably on my phone. If I decide to ignore the phone call, the project gets serious and commences the final stage where we bring out the big guns. When you ignore all 3 stages, we send a command that triggers the water gun and shoots the distracted victim which is myself, If I try to resist and run away the water gun automatically tracks me and shoots me wherever I go.

## How we built it

We built it using fully recyclable materials as the future innovators of tomorrow, our number one priority is the environment. We made our foundation fully off of trash cardboard, chopsticks, and hot glue. The turret was built using our hardware kit we brought from home and used 3 servos mounted on stilts to hold the water gun in the air. We have a software portion where we hacked a MindFlex to read off brainwaves to activate a water gun trigger. We used a string mechanism to activate the trigger and OpenCV to track the user's face.

## Challenges we ran into

Challenges we ran into was trying to multi-thread the Arduino and Python together. Connecting the MindFlex data with the Arduino was a pain in the ass, we had come up with many different solutions but none of them were efficient. The data was delayed, trying to read and write back and forth and the camera display speed was slowing down due to that, making the tracking worse. We eventually carried through and figured out the solution to it.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

Accomplishments we are proud of is our engineering capabilities of creating a turret using spare scraps. Combining both the Arduino and MindFlex was something we've never done before and making it work was such a great feeling. Using Twilio and sending messages and calls is also new to us and such a new concept, but getting familiar with and using its capabilities opened a new door of opportunities for future projects.

## What we learned

We've learned many things from using Twilio and hacking into the MindFlex, we've learned a lot more about electronics and circuitry through this and procrastination. After creating this project, we've learned discipline as we never missed a deadline ever again.

## What's next for You snooze you lose. We dont lose

Coming into this hackathon, we had a lot of ambitious ideas that we had to scrap away due to the lack of materials. Including, a life-size human robot although we concluded with an automatic water gun turret controlled through brain control. We want to expand on this project with using brain signals as it's our first hackathon trying this out