MLH Hacky Birthday Hackathon Digi-Key Best Hardware Hack Winner
Team Members: Emily Lukas, Veronica Nguyen, Matthew Sam, Christopher Tang
The recent pandemic outbreak has led to further emphasis in personal hygiene and protective face masks. Although this situation has been hard for everyone, it has been especially difficult for those who struggle to communicate verbally. Our team wanted to build a product that promotes staying safe, prevents the spread of the virus and empowers those who need a voice.
The first step in our design process was deciding on the physical design of our face mask and the integration of a display with a comfortable face mask. While flexible screens do exist, they were not up to the standard we desired nor available to us for this 24 hour hack. Thus we decided to use a LCD display that would attach to a custom face mask. We also wanted a wireless communication between the app and the facial display. To achieve this, we decided to utilize an Arduino in the circuit to control the LCD display and to communicate with our app via wifi. In terms of hardware, we were able to display custom messages on the LCD and wire the Arduino such that it was free-standing (connected to a smaller power source), allowing for a smooth integration to our mask designs had we had access to the necessary parts. The UI was designed using Figma, with an Android as our target device. We aimed for a clean and minimalist design with a light colour scheme. Once it was completed, we moved on to coding the app functionality features, using React Native. We spent the majority of our time familiarizing ourselves with React Native and Firebase, debugging the text input, and the message save and delete functions.