LITBIT

Component pinout

What is it?: 

LitBit is an IOT fanny pack to keep users safe at parties, music festivals, and other events. Users interact directly with it through two buttons and an OLED screen accessible through the clear housing of the fanny pack. Within the fanny pack, there is also an IMU, GPS, WiFi chip, and microphone to provide the following features:

• Find Your Friends: Using the IMU as a compass, WiFi module, and GPS data, the LitBit can point you to your friends also wearing the LitBit

• Live Uber Pricing: Using the GPS data, WiFi module, and Uber API, you can press a button to see how much an Uber home from your current location is

• Alert My Friends: If you're inactive for a long period of time (the IMU detects little to no movement), the LitBit will ask you if you're okay. If you don't respond, your fanny pack will flash red to alert others around you, as well as notify your other LitBit wearing friends through the WiFi module.

• Beat Detecting Lights: The LEDs strung around the LitBit light up different patterns to the beat of the music, using the microphone as input and performing a fast Fourier transform on this data.

How did you contribute?

The Litbit was a collaborative effort between four people, and I focused on three main areas:

• End-to-end system design (finite state machine structure/planning)

• Uber API implementation

• Fanny pack design and wearable hardware storage solution

Together our team created two LitBit prototypes that could communicate with each other to perform the four main features.

Biggest Takeaways?

• Managing design tradeoffs- we wanted to include more features which required more sensors, but we also wanted to keep the battery life reasonable and fanny pack light

• Considering hardware design and software design simultaneously- most of my past projects had only been considering one or the other, but the nature of a wearable consumer electronic and its size/scale requires both to be considered simultaneously in the design