Prior to Spring Break our group decided to  change our entire product need that we were working on. Although we felt that the we could create a solution to the problem we identified (although even that would have been tricky), we concluded that their was not enough of a need for our product to be used with a wide range of people.

Putting further thought and discussion as a team was the right call in that we have found a product solution that we beleive will be acheivable and more importantly providing a need for in home security. Brian our teammate, brought up how many of the apartments and homes here do not have any time of secured entry to the doorway. Often times when people leave their apartments or homes they have issues with breakins or people within their home. From this problem and need of low cost in home security, we came up with the idea of creating a home or room “alarm” / notification device. This device would recognize when a front door (or any door) was opened and would give a user 10 seconds to hit a button upon enterning the home. If the user did not hit the button near the door, the device would send out an SMS text message to the residents within the home. Having this device would allow users to know if someone had entered there home particularly when someone shouldn’t. More importantly, those within the home would know where the button is and to hit it when unlocking the door. The device can also be turned off, so that if users are constantly opening the door, they don’t have to worry about hitting the button.

Our next step was in class coming up with our prototype and seeing what parts we would need to actually create this  device. We created our components list, which at first was a bit overwhelming in terms of thinking about making this prototype. After we were assisted and given direction on being able to get much of this from Vishal, our team was confident going forward. Over the next few days we will be finalizing obtaining all of these components, and are excited to actually start putting our device named “SMS Security” together. Much of the components and things we need are pretty much thing we had experience from the Fab Lab, such as the bread board, Raspberry Pi programming, and the jumper wires. The external device we keep this in will likley be something that we 3D print, which I think is great in how we can fully make and  customize the shape around the components of our device with the 3D printer. Overall we look forward to seeing how our first prototype turns out in the days ahead!!