This project was made at the IDEA Hacks hardware hackathon hosted at UCLA - this year’s theme revolved around household appliances.
The night the hackathon began - I was grabbing dinner at the In-n-out with the rest of my team and remarked “I wish i made burgers like these back at home, but lets be honest I’d probably burn down the dorms at USC by accident” My buddies knowing how bad of a cook I am first hand continued on with all the bad times I’ve had with cooking and concluded that I should never be allowed any hot surface. And it was right there that the Safe Stove was born.
The SafeStove revolves around the idea that there are certain people (ie kids, Joel’s of the world, etc) who should never be in front of a flame.
Cool Features:
1) Facial Recognition Technology - We actually trained the camera using a facial recognition API on our raspberry pi to detect my face using a couple photos of me. Essentially when I wander around the stove (as seen in the demo) the stove notices and automatically turns off the stove.
2) Ultrasonic Sensors - Sometimes you forget to leave the stove on, you’re a human and it happens. We put ultrasonic sensors on our stove so it can detect when you are no longer in the kitchen - and automatically turn off the stove.
3) Capacitive Sensors - When your hands get too close to the stove, the fire is automatically turns off
4) Interfacing between 2 Arduinos and a Raspberry Pi - This was my first time hooking up two different systems together and it was a pretty interesting experience. My team spent an hour troubleshooting why signals were not being communicated between the boards before I realized the boards were not sharing a common ground line.
5) Completely Joel Proof - Like this is probably the most impressive feature if we are being honest. I could not figure out a way to get burned on this stove even when I tried. And if I couldn’t figure out a way to get hurt on this stove I can almost guarantee no one else would.
Here’s a video of the first round presentation we gave (click here)- keep in mind we had gotten something like 8 hours of sleep over like 3 days:
If you’d like to see the pitch deck click here!
At the end of the Hackathon my team of USC freshman and sophomores took 3rd - the two teams above us were made up entirely of UCLA graduate students :(
But over all it was an amazing experience building this and really having fun with the rest of my team.
Our team mate Jan, had to leave early bc she caught a cold at the hackathon. But honestly I loved my team so much. From left to right (Chris Hailey, Joel Joseph, Ishan Shah, Aditya Bellathur).