It’s been another year and we had another Hackathon at work.
I still went with a hardware theme, but this year I actually had some people interested in helping me. I think the two extra sets of hands and brains helped.
For this year’s event, I decided to do an Alexa controlled air freshener. My wife brought home one of those automatic glade ones that sprits every few minutes. The problem I have with it is it sits in the laundry room. It can be quite loud when it goes off and if I’m having a hard time sleeping, it keeps me up… even though it only triggers every 30 minutes.
My initial design goal was to hack an ESP32 into it so that I can have it not trigger during my normal sleep schedule. The stretch goal was to be able to have Alexa trigger it and to have Alexa turn on a ‘nap’ time where it won’t trigger for a few hours.
My team was able to meet all of these goals. We did good enough to bring home 3 of the 7 awards given out… Most Creative, Best team spirit, and Most Polished.
We had some ups and downs in the process, but in the end it all worked out. I finished the wooden stand for it over the weekend. I haven’t had a chance to get the MPCNC up and running since the move, so I had to hand route the faceplate for the control board. The bit grabbed once or twice and ripped out some of the wood, so I turned them into ‘design features’. The first picture is how it was presented during the demos. The next two is after I finished it over the weekend. The mortise for the faceplate worked perfect for holding the control board for the demo.
