This was an individual project predicated on the idea of a Personal Pet Peeve. The thing I hate most is having to respond to emails with people who are being passive aggressive, it’s emotionally and physically draining and also a problem that everyone has had in the working world at one point or another. 

My way of alleviating this frustration is to create a machine to automate those emails. The system will ask questions to provide you with the perfect response to those annoying emails everyone hates to get. As an added bonus, the system can also be more or less sarcastic, depending on the ‘sarcasm-meter’. I wanted a way to add physical ‘character’ to the system, so a servo is set to go off every few minutes. The servo pops up, opening the top of the box, so that the user can see the googly eyes attached to the top of the box. I wanted it to feel like something ‘lived’ inside of the box that you are interfacing with, instead of just answering questions on a computer screen. A neopixel strip animates while the box is ‘thinking’ to provide feedback when you press a button. 

This project focused on electronics skill, coding, laser cutting, soldering and 3D printing. 

All in all, I used a variety of sensors and actuators on this project, including a NeoPixel Strip, Two buttons, a potentiometer, an LCD Screen and a Servo Motor. All these are connected to one Arduino with the logic written on the Arduino IDE. The box that houses the electronics is laser cut and designed in Rhino. I designed and 3D printed a bracket for the servo motor and the googly eyes using Blender and the Cura slicer.