After that, I was flailing around a bit for a project idea; I had a bunch of different ideas floating around, like a soil moisture monitoring app (for checking up on my plants in the care of my husband back on the east coast while I was at Hackbright in San Francisco), but wasn't super excited about any one idea. I told Christian that I wanted to do something with an Arduino or Raspberry Pi because I'd never worked with electronics at all before and one of things that had put me off computer science originally in high school is that I thought you had to be one of those people who could built computers from scratch.
That isn't true these days, but it seemed like it would be a very useful skill to pick up for projects with real-world physical usefulness (like this Raspberry Pi-powered cat feeder! I should build this for my parents, saddled with my cat that I can sadly never have at my own home due to my husband being allergic to cats). I am a very pragmatic person and while I very much enjoy pretty things (Pinterest, design/fashion blogs, etc.), I like cooking because I like eating, I like knitting/sewing for the creations that you end up with at the end, etc.--so for me, it's less about the process than about the end result being useful in some way.
I also told Christian that when it came to programming, the bit that I liked best was breaking down a problem to figuring out the solution, and he intuited that once I had proof-of-concept that it would work, I wasn't much interested in implementing the extra stuff, so I wasn't going to be too interested in something that was very front end heavy and require a lot of wrangling with HTML/CSS and such.
Given all that, he gave me this paper published in 2009 by from computer scientists at Rice University called uWave: Accelerometer-based personalized gesture recognition and its applications. It was a bit tough to read through at first but I got to the section on practical applications for it on the same day that a Hackbright classmate gave a talk on 2-factor authentication and a light bulb went off that what the paper was talking about, 3-D motion-based passwords, would save me from the pain of 2-factor authentication!
We have to use 2-factor authentication at work and I've gotten stuck a number of times because I left my phone or forgot the device that gives that 2nd factor. Motion-based password would be something that's pretty easy for you to remember, but pretty hard for someone else to replicate exactly even if they had watched you do it because your hand movements will vary enough that the authentication system should reject them.
So in summary, I wanted a project that had:
- hardware
- a clear real-world use
- more backend than frontend
Anyway, I'll be writing a series of tutorials on how I did the project in the hopes that it will be helpful for future Hackbright students or other beginners to electronics projects.
