First version of our prototype

So after some time and consultments with Noa & Oren we decided to develop a "Smart bag".

The main idea was to build a bag that will help to prevent ADHD users to forget stuff at home before they leave their homes.

So we both consulted about the technologies we will use to achieve this goal and after some observations we agreed that we will use the RFID technology for the first version (Just to give a glimpse at what our final goal is) and Low Energy Bluetooth device for the next phase.

So basically, we want for the first POC to have a set of led pairs (one led colored red, and one led colored green).

We will take an RFID sticker, which is something like this:

We will stick it into the user's daily equipment (e.g: laptop, phone charger, etc... )

When the users inserts this equipment into his bag, it will pass through a scanner which will recognize that this item was inserted into to bag and will give feedback about it (A red led will turn into green), and when the user inserts all the known equipment, he will also get a feedback that he is ready to go.

To scan the stickers, we took an RFID Eval Shield (Thanks again, IDC Media Lab :P ):

This is very easy to work with, since it has the layout of an Arduino shield, you just plug it inside the Arduino and that's all.

You can look at the vendor's product page to get an example code to work with:

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10406

The next challenge we encountered is that we want to control 8 leds (4 red, 4 green):

And while the Arduino has 13 digital pins, which is enough, it seemed rather not right and inefficient to sacrifice 8 pins for this simple task.

We knew that if we wanted to expand our functionality this we need to be cheap with pins we give away, so we used a shift register to solve this:

Which can control 8 different leds with just 3 digital pins! It seemed like the right way to go, so we built this schematic:

And everything went well, but we wanted a more elegant circuit, so we got rid of the breadboard, took 2 small prototyping boards and sothered all together, this is how it looked at the end:

After we tested some codes this is what eventually came out:

So everything works nicely by now :) But we still got a lot more to do.

We opened a github repository to share our code and updates, check it out:

https://github.com/reiseldaniel/IDC_MiLAB

Until the next time,

Liron Zuarets & Daniel Reisel.

IDC Media Lab - ADHD Group