moddedtechnic/hacknotts23

The blind again shall see.

ReVision

An entry into HackNotts23.

Inspiration

'Twas the night 'fore submission, when all through the hack, The banshee was heard by all those named Jack. Yet nothing, from nowhere, did'st our microphones hear, As deaf as a door nail was each silicon ear. Yet what robots lose, that is what we regain, To blind we give sight and an end to the pain.

What it does

The device uses ultrasonic distance sensors to measure distances to nearby obstacles, and provides this feedback to the user with a series of audible clicks.

How we built it

Caffeine, sleep deprivation, and solitude. After much experimentation of trying to send and receive audio signals between Raspberry Pi's and discovering an inability to receive the audio signals, we had to drastically alter the project. During this moment of blindness, we realised the importance of clear vision. Whilst there was a lack of time to completely cure blindness, we discovered that any clarity, any refinement in visual resolution, was a gift from the Hackathon gods. As such, we decided to help those who are truly blind discover obstacles in their environment without requiring either a guide dog or a stick. Large sections of code were transferred from earlier experiments, with the hardware being built out gradually again from these experiments.

Challenges we ran into

We initially struggled to emit noises in any useful manner. Once this was achieved, we discovered the difficulty in reading this data. The final challenges we encountered involved the infamous "Integration Hell", trying to merge separate modules to form a working solution.

What we learned

Dealing with sound on digital interfaces is an extraordinarily difficult task, best left to analogue devices more suited to the task.