Smart watch WatchOut!

I guess it all started in one of the classes i was taking in Foothill College during Fall 2014. It was Engineering 10: Introduction To Engineering. As a final project for that class I was assigned to one of the groups of 5 people to work one the "Assistive device". We were supposed to do a research about our "focus group", people with some sort of disabilities, learn about what kind of everyday problems this disabilities brings to their life and propose some sort of engineering solution for it.

After some boring research, discussion and brainstorming with my team we decided to work toward helping people with Peripheral Neuropathy. Simply saying it is people, who due to some traumas lost a sense of  temperature. They can't feel cold or hot. On one side it side kinda cool, since they are not suffering during super warm or cold weather, but the downside is that they still can feel pain of a burned skin out of touching something hot, or any other consequences of being exposed to extreme temperature. So we decided to build some sort of wearable device that will tell the temperature of a surface, that this are about to touch before they will touch it. Google told us about devices like the one on a picture below, but we couldn't find on a market anything more comfortable than that, so we decided to work toward that direction. 

At first the idea was to make some some sort of a wrist band with a sensor and few LEDs that will shine if sensor reads something hot.

We decided to start here. I was just starting to work with arduino back then, so I ordered my very first arduino nano, IR thermo sensor that can read temperature on a distance up to 3 meters( I think, can't recall now) and started tinkering with it. At that stage our team everyone in our team was assigned to the roles that they suit best, so all the electronic engineering was on me, design and 3D printing was on Bryce Jensen, Lars Brausewetter and Tsering Dolkar was assigned to research about the disease and all the paper work.

Within about the week all the parts got delivered and started to tinker with it.

One evening and I had success: the prototype was fully functional and ready to show.

On the video: one LED lights up if sensor reads some temperature above temperature in the room (such as my hands), two LEDs light's up if the sensor reads dangerous temperature, like turned on stove. I had three more weeks before the final presentation, so I decided to research about possible functionality. Same day I ordered a Bluetooth module for Arduino and screen from old Nokia. Within a week I was tinkering again with that parts.

I found an app for Android that can talk to Arduino Serial over the Bluetooth and get the data about the temperature.

(yes, my phone stands in a Myo Armband )

So, I had two weeks until due date.

During this two weeks I was discussing with Bryce the new design for that watch, tinkering with other screens for Arduino and trying to find a good 3d printer. The luck came to me only last few days before the due date of the final presentation.
My friend Scott printed some parts on his home made 3d printer. The quality of the parts wasn't very good, but it was representative and helpful on that stage.

Thanks to Oxana Pantchenko, the night before the presentation I was able to print all the parts of the frame on super cool 3d printer in Foothill 3D lab.


I had one night left to assemble device and write the firmware for it. So I went to Bryce's house and we started a local one-night-hackathon there.








A lot of unexpected happened during that marathon. I wrote a firmware with functionality to connect to smartphone, send it data about the temperature and current settings of the device and react on some commands from the phone, such as:

• set a current time (yes, it wasn't automatically on that stage)
• choose the temperature scale: Celsius or Fahrenheit
• swap the screen upside down, in case if the person want's to wear it on a left hand
• set the thresholds of the temperature to alarm and notify the user

(that's all I can remember)
Unfortunately, Arduino IDE doesn't save the code while it compiling it and at 6 am my laptop crashed and I lost all the code. Total disaster, few hours before the presentation, all the code lost, device is not fully assembled yet and the power controller and sensor seemed to be broken. All at once. Panic.
Ok, forget the power, during the presentation we will just plug it to laptop and power from it. But what can we do with broken sensor?
In a panic I realized that Arduino itself has installed in it some version of the code, not the final though. I am trying to recall what functionality that code had and what we can do with it.
The code was almost done, just the support of the sensor was turned off for testing purposed. The rest was working, Super great, since if the support of the sensor would be turned on, but the sensor itself would be broken, non of the functionality would be working. Miracle.
But we have to show on the presentation how exactly it will be alarming in case if sensor would be broken and it would read temperature higher then threshold. How can I do it? So, what do we have:

1. To alarm the device I need a threshold to be below(not equal) the the temperature on a sensor.
2. Default temperature on the device with broken sensor was 0 degree Celsius.
3. The lowest I can set threshold is 0 degree since I didn't add support of a negative number in communication between phone and the device.

That was a tricky puzzle, solution to which I figured out only in a car on the way to college:

From my phone I am setting the threshold 0 degrees Fahrenheit, which is lower than 0 degree Celsius. The unequation works, the device alarms, presentation goes successfully, audience applause.

The end.
I never fixed all the issues of the device, but I learned a lot during that project. I learned how to use Arduino with Bluetooth, Screen and sensors. I learned basics of 3d Printing and don't leave everything for the last night. I guess that's all. Anyway, it the most ambiguous projects I v'd done at that point of my life - my own smartwatch. Thanks for reading.