smart seatbelt


Children being left in hot cars is quite common. To combat this, some friends and I decided to make a “smart seatbelt” that, when connected through an app, notifies a parent if they left their child in a car. This was my first hackathon, which lasted ten hours instead of the promised weekend.


Technical


The idea originally came from one of my friends/teammates. Naturally, we did a quick group brainstorm to flesh out ideas. To sense whether a baby was in the seat, we had two ideas. 1, a weight sensor at the bottom of the seat. And 2, a switch to tell whether the seatbelt is buckled. We hypothesized that the weight sensor will have more false alarms due to wedged objects and parents using the seat to hold items when not in use. Thus, we decided to go with the switch design. Due to the limited selection of materials on site, we decided the best way to sense whether the belt buckle was open or closed was to integrate a limit switch that would close when a person buckles the seatbelt.

The on-site 3D printer not only had a long queue, but it was malfunctioning. Quickly, we switched to a wooden prototype.


Result


Smart seatbelt CAD

The CAD design, almost finished.


Review


What went well:

  • This was my first hackathon.
  • Everybody was productive.

Not so hot:

  • We ran out of time with app/bluetooth portion.
  • We didn’t have enough time to 3D print the case.
  • I spent too much time on the case.


Award


Runner-up at 10,000 Makes Hackathon