Hall Monitor
September 2015
For HackMIT 2015, a 24-hour hackathon, I helped create a lounge monitor called Hall Monitor. I worked on a four-person team with my friends: Rachel Thornton, Rachael Devlin, and David Ricardo. Hall Monitor worked as a system to enforce quiet hours in our dorm's lounge. Hall Monitor displayed the time, the current volume level, whether it was quiet hours or not, and how many people were trying to sleep. If the lounge was too loud during quiet hours, Hall Monitor told the lounge to be quiet, using a firmer message if people were trying to sleep.
Hall Monitor was built using a Raspberry Pi. The current volume level was determined with a USB microphone. We implemented an email tracking system to determine the number of people trying to sleep. When a person was going to sleep and wanted to tell Hall Monitor, they sent an email to its associated email address. Hall Monitor updated the sleeping count for all unique senders.
On the team, I was in charge of the Raspberry Pi and its associated hardware. Additionally, I created the email system which generated the sleeping count using Google Scripts. I also assisted in setting up the volume monitoring, which was built in Python. The other team members had more experience with front-end development, so they created the display page which was shown on the monitor.
By the end of HackMIT, we got Hall Monitor working! We set it up in our lounge, and it worked as desired. However, it didn't last for long; it turns out that not everyone was a big fan of a computer yelling at people in the lounge at night.
Here I am hard at work setting up the Raspberry Pi.
HackMIT was a huge event.
Here's the final product and the team that made it. I switched shirts by the end.