## Inspiration

## What it does

Buddy is your personal assistant that monitors your device's screen-on time so you can better understand your phone usage statistics. These newfound insights will help you to optimize your time and understand your usage patterns. Set a maximum screen-on time goal for yourself and your personal assistant, Buddy, will become happier the less you use your device and become more unhappy as you get close to or exceed the limit you set for yourself.

## How we built it

We built an android app using the NativeScript framework while coding in JavaScript. Our graphics were created through the use of Photoshop.

## Challenges we ran into

As it was our team's first time creating an android app, we went through much trial and error. Learning Google Firebase and the NativeScript framework was a welcomed challenge. We also faced some technical limitations two of our 3 computers were unable to emulate the app. Thus our ability to do testing was limited and as a result slowed our overall progress.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

## What we learned

We were strangers when we met and had different backgrounds of experience. The three of us were separately experienced in either front-end, back-end, and UI/UX which made for a very interesting team dynamic. Handling better CSS, using better classes, and utilizing frameworks such as NativeScript were all things we learned from each other (and the internet).

## What's next for Buddy

Buddy will be venturing on to increase the depth of our phone usage analysis by not only including screen-on time but also usage by app. We also highly value user experience so we are looking into creating more customizable options such as different species of pets, colours of fur, and much more. An IOS app is also being considered as the next step for our product.
![UpLync](https://s18.postimg.org/5syr0jrg9/ss_2016_10_15_at_06_36_48.png)

## Inspiration

Two weeks ago you attended an event and have met some wonderful people to help get through the event, each one of you exchanged contact information and hope to keep in touch with each other. Neither one of you contacted each other and eventually lost contact with each other. A potentially valuable friendship is lost due to neither party taking the initiative to talk to each other before. This is where *UpLync* comes to the rescue, a mobile app that is able to ease the connectivity with lost contacts.

## What it does?

It helps connect to people you have not been in touch for a while, the mobile application also reminds you have not been contacting a certain individual in some time. In addition, it has a word prediction function that allows users to send a simple greeting message using the gestures of a finger.

## Building process

We used mainly react-native to build the app, we use this javascript framework because it has cross platform functionality. Facebook has made a detailed documented tutorial at [link](https://facebook.github.io/react-native) and also [link](http://nativebase.io/) for easier cross-platform coding, we started with

* Designing a user interface that can be easily coded for both iOS and Android
* Functionality of the Lazy Typer
* Touch up with color scheme
* Coming up with a name for the application
* Designing a Logo

## Challenges we ran into

* non of the team members know each other before the event
* Coding in a new environment
* Was to come up with a simple UI that is easy on the eyes
* Keeping people connected through a mobile app
* Reduce the time taken to craft a message and send

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

* Manage to create a product with React-Native for the first time
* We are able to pick out a smooth font and colour scheme to polish up the UI
* Enabling push notifications to remind the user to reply
* The time taken to craft a message was reduced by 35% with the help of our lazy typing function

## What we learned.

We are able to learn the ins-and-outs of react-native framework, it saves us work to use android studio to create the application.

## What's next for UpLync

The next step for UpLync is to create an AI that learns the way how the user communicates with their peers and provide a suitable sentence structure. This application offers room to provide support for other languages and hopefully move into wearable technology.
## Inspiration

We realized how visually-impaired people find it difficult to perceive the objects coming near to them, or when they are either out on road, or when they are inside a building. They encounter potholes and stairs and things get really hard for them. We decided to tackle the issue of accessibility to support the Government of Canada's initiative to make work and public places completely accessible!

## What it does

This is an IoT device which is designed to be something wearable or that can be attached to any visual aid being used. What it does is that it uses depth perception to perform obstacle detection, as well as integrates Google Assistant for outdoor navigation and all the other "smart activities" that the assistant can do. The assistant will provide voice directions (which can be geared towards using bluetooth devices easily) and the sensors will help in avoiding obstacles which helps in increasing self-awareness. Another beta-feature was to identify moving obstacles and play sounds so the person can recognize those moving objects (eg. barking sounds for a dog etc.)

## How we built it

Its a raspberry-pi based device and we integrated Google Cloud SDK to be able to use the vision API and the Assistant and all the other features offered by GCP. We have sensors for depth perception and buzzers to play alert sounds as well as camera and microphone.

## Challenges we ran into

It was hard for us to set up raspberry-pi, having had no background with it. We had to learn how to integrate cloud platforms with embedded systems and understand how micro controllers work, especially not being from the engineering background and 2 members being high school students. Also, multi-threading was a challenge for us in embedded architecture

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

After hours of grinding, we were able to get the raspberry-pi working, as well as implementing depth perception and location tracking using Google Assistant, as well as object recognition.

## What we learned

Working with hardware is tough, even though you could see what is happening, it was hard to interface software and hardware.

## What's next for i4Noi

We want to explore more ways where i4Noi can help make things more accessible for blind people. Since we already have Google Cloud integration, we could integrate our another feature where we play sounds of living obstacles so special care can be done, for example when a dog comes in front, we produce barking sounds to alert the person. We would also like to implement multi-threading for our two processes and make this device as wearable as possible, so it can make a difference to the lives of the people.