Project Summary

A solution for organization, an interactive whiteboard with planning features and automatic updates, offering a flexible and engaging “life management” experience. It empowers users to customize their task management with themes and mini games. Elevate your productivity and mental health with a planner designed for you.

Team Members

Sydney Calcagno: Website Portal Design, User Interface Design
Jason Fontillas: Human Interaction, Graphic Development
Henry Waill: Hardware Design, Software Engineering

Why Make This Project?

The intended audience for our project are those who struggle with ADHD or those who seek an alternative to digital interfaces for creating a schedule of events, weekly calendar items, and overall daily organization. The automated writing process allows the board to function as a message board to display items that need to get done. Using a whiteboard allows for a person to move magnets into the checkboxes to signify the accomplishment of tasks, in which the board responds with fun drawings to keep the user motivated and feeling rewarded. A physical product for productivity gives the user more room for engagement in finishing tasks that can proudly be displayed in the real world.

How It Works

The board utilizes an Arduino UNO R4 Wifi that connects to a web portal that allows for users to customize their board experience. The portal allows users to create a profile and enter in the items they want to accomplish throughout the week. The time is programmed into the Arduino microcontroller to allow for a morning, afternoon, and evening update as the list of tasks changes throughout the day.

Features:

• To-Do Lists
  • For keeping the user updated on productivity
• Updates Throughout the Day
  • Shows the date and updates the To-Do list regarding the time of day
• Mood Tracking
  • …is proven to help with daily mental health
• Automatic Weather Updates
  • Know how to plan 
• Play a Mini Game
  • Relieve stress from the day with a game of Tic-Tac-Toe against the AI board
• Be Inspired
  • …by a new daily quote 

My Contribution

My main role in this project was to focus on how users would want to utilize a board as a daily planner. Whiteboard are an excellent tool for organization and task management, but the medium allows for quick rewrites and a satisfying display of dry erase marker and a clean canvas. After using testing and interviews, I found that people who use whiteboards use them as a message board for planning around a week in advance. People tend to take a single day at the start of the week for developing a plan of action and list of items that need to be done and keep them on display in view from around a room. This differs from planners and notebooks that are referenced

In addition to the user experience and testing, I was also tasked with creating the digital layout of the board. Using an Illustrator file, I recreated the dimensions of the board to reflect the true canvas of the whiteboard and areas where the pen plotter could write and draw. The display largely depended on getting precise measurements that lined up with hall effect sensors attached to the back of the board for the magnet interaction.

In the early phase of the building process, I contributed to designing a test font of G-code letters for the CNC arms to plot when to move in the x and y axis. We used a GRBL library stored on the Adafruit Metro Mini 328P microcontroller that would take in these lines of code and move the arms in the desired direction to form letters and graphics. First, I used Inkscape to create a character or drawing. Then using the extensions for G-code tools would, I was able to obtain

Looking Ahead…

The development of this project let me see the unlimited possibility that an automated writing board can have for future iterations. The black canvas of the whiteboard allows for so many possibilities in terms of customization and incorporation of newer features. Wifi connectivity opens the door for more features to be added through API’s and connecting with existing digital workspaces, allowing more opportunity to bring those ideas to the tactile and real world on the TODOS board.