[Chris] shares a dorm room with five other people. When living with others its important to stay on top of cleaning and to do so equitably the sextuplet came up with a well-planned whiteboard of chores. The problem lies in getting everyone to do theirs in a timely manner. To help facilitate this, [Chris] came up with a system that lets roommates swap chores, giving each other IOU’s for future duties.
The system uses an Arduino board along with an RTC chip for precise timekeeping. The user interface is made up of a graphic LCD and a keypad with everything mounted inside of a cardboard box. [Chris] shows off his system in the video after the break, spending the majority of time on the debt system. The roommates have a pot of money for group groceries and this system will let you know where everyone stands. But according to his written description this also stores the calendar of chores that need to get done, and will let you trade with one another to fit your personal schedule.
So now the issue is getting everyone to use the system. But we don’t think that’s going to be too tough since all six of them are computer scientists.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c43Rz-L-YEc&w=470]
What is the purpose of the jar in there?
Is it where the money is placed?
Wires, so many wires.
Is it me, or is the arduino mega a bit overpowered, couldn’t a normal arduino and some additional chips do this? Like external ram/flash memory for storage), and some shift registers/buffers to deal with larger buses? I mean, it might not be as easy, but it wouldn’t require a mega.
sextuplet = One of six siblings born at the same time, to the same mother. I believe the word you want there is “sextet”.
That’s a pretty sweet system. It’s also a good candidate for an app running “in the cloud” if you didn’t want to go with embedded.
In dorm of geeks, why an enclosure? Turn it into wall art, with a can of air next to to dust it off, once in awhile. Unless it’s dorm with six drunken, rowdy geeks, and all their friends are drunken,rowdy friends, geeks or not. As for house keeping for a group that large hiring a maid service may make sense, but for cash strapped students maybe not.
Where did the key pad come from?
This keypad, to me, appears to be the same one pictured in my 2 year old Jameco catalog…