Mindful Droid - Take Action against Air Pollution

Based on the accumulated results from the survey, the Mindful Droid will be a visually informative and educating device to raise awareness and bring the reality of air pollution around school areas and commutes. It will not be invasive but a subtle constant reminder of the effects of emissions and actions to help reduce them. Psychologically, this would lead to taking positive actions and changing behaviours subconsciously with the information absorbed.

The Mindful Droid is set to be proactive and not reactive to air pollution and if the information is repeated enough the mind will subconsciously take it in.

Please see survey below and how it will influence the Mindful Droid.

Video shows Traffic Congestion around the school area during peak pickup times and people queuing to get into the school.

In this case there is no control of vehicles to stay away from the "safe school zone'

No awareness from drivers about  the toxic fumes they are emitting from their vehicles whilst idling. 

Local and School authorities have no data around this issue and how best to take effective action 

Children and adult are exposed to this poisonous fumes as they wait to pick up their children

MindFul Droid Ideation & Cardboard Protototyping

For those who might be interest in the art creative part of this project, designing the smiley pixel faces, below is the process is fun process I went through.

I have had to use an open-source platform PixelArt to design the Art animation for the Droid. The process was quite straight forward once I knew the type of animation I wanted on the Droid. The platform has tutorials on how to achieve desired design effect. For this process, I would recommend sketching ideas on paper first to help understand how to bring them onto pixel art. I did struggle as I had some restraints with the pixel canvas size which was 18x10, making it difficult to get proportional designs on the droid. However, I was able to make about 18-pixel designs for the droid and the fun part is you can do this also by yourself following the steps taken.

Going for a smaller pixel pitch size is something I would consider doing moving forward, to allow freedom of manipulating pictures into pixel canvas easily.

An example below is of an angry face pixel design that will appear and reflect upon a high polluted room or environment.

Once a design has been made, the next phase is to convert this into the droid. This is done using Led Matrix Control software (LMCS) by YouTuber Tyler Jones. This is used for controlling LED matrix in real-time.

The LED control software helps to convert the pixel-designed files, this means I can save the design to “.txt” format that will be readable by the Droid when uploaded onto Arduino. Another cool feature with LMCS is that you can upload actual images and convert them directly into pixel art in real-time with little or no iterations.

The link above on his name, directs you to his youtube video tutorials on how to achieve desirable pixel art design and animations of your choice.

I have also attached all the pixel art designs I made for the droid on files attachment section.

What's next I hear you say?

I believe in continuous improvement and there is a lot more to achieve with the Mindful Droid, in terms of Hardware, software and deployment of device .

This will be done by having a team of activists and action takers consisting of designers, engineers - hardware/software hackers.  

With a team, there is a wider scope for execution, infrastructure and deployment.
A way to keep control of this is by creating a 'Mindful Droid App' for the next version that helps in regulating the devices distributed from a hub and also for users to have a streamlined process for setting up, debugging/calibrating sensors, updating and uploading data to and from device.

From a user experience and interaction point of view, I would also like to expand the visual animation interface further, as I believe that there is room for more experimentation and better pixel art designs that can be creatively engaging for its users attracting the awareness for change. 

With all of this in place, it would create a community that are contributing to a global air quality data, pushing a positive narrative toward air pollution.

From my design experience, and following Dieter Rams principles of  a "good design is thorough to the last detail", a smooth and comprehensive interaction is needed. I want the Mindful Droid to work well and not just be a project device that has limitations.

Overall, I believe with the support and collaboration from Hackaday and community members, there will be a plethora of things that can be achieved technically beyond my approach on this project and this is what I hope for with Mindful Droid version 2.0.

I am always open to opportunities and collaborations with other community members and groups.