Junior Design Project: Anti-Procrastination Timer

I’m excited to share my latest project, the Anti-Procrastination timer. This timer makes your phone inaccessible for the duration of the countdown to help you stay focused and prevent procrastination. I collaborated with two of my peers, John Vieth and Ahngoh Mcdaniel, to create it from scratch in just over two months.

Although I have previously worked on numerous full-stack projects, this was my first time combining software with hardware and mechanical design. We designed and fabricated a custom buck convertor PCB to power up our Raspberry Pi. We also created a front end for the timer using the Tkinter module and integrated a Roboflow Object Detection model to determine if the phone was actually a phone. This was to prevent the end-user from trying to trick our system with a TV remote or a different object!

This project allowed me to use my newly learned parallel programming skills from my OS class, improve my Python knowledge, and learn how to debug hardware issues with multimeters and oscilloscopes. Beyond all the technical skills, it also allowed me to expand on my soft skills as I gained experience working with a team of people I had never met before. I’m proud of the project we built and grateful for the recognition from the EECS department for being one of the most liked projects.

Check out our project at here!