Orientron

Why:

A lot of people spend most of their time in the day working in front of the computer screens. While working on our tasks often we get the temptation to switch to check the latest updates on our social network, our favorite sports, latest stock updates, weather and more. This distraction is the productivity killer and a study by Microsoft Research suggests that now our average concentration span has decreased from 20 minutes to just 8 minutes. In order for people to work with their full potential, there is a need for people to overcome these productivity killers.

What:

The idea is to decouple the temptations like facebook, ESPN and twitter from laptop so that people can access the same information without changing the tabs on their laptops.

Orientron is an e-paper based interactive device which displays the relevant information from your favorite apps. This ultra low power button-less device can be rotated 90 degrees to switch to one of the 4 subscribed apps. Users can select these 4 favorite apps from the phone. For the demo purposes the device now has four applications: cricket score, stock updates, weather updates and horoscope. The vision is to build orientron APIs through which any user can subscribe to four services (each for a different orientation) from a list of many services, such as facebook, cricket score, twitter, Amazon shipping status. weather update, horoscope etc.

How:

The device used e-paper display from Embedded artists. Arduino 101 is used as the compute unit. The inbuilt BLE provide as the capability to receive and transmit data to the smart phones. In addition, the accelerometer on Arduino 101 helps in detecting the orientation. The Windows store/Android application fetch the data from different services and push .xbm file to arduino 101.

Future:

1. Porting more services to the device

2. Making it voice enabled by adding a AI voice assistant like Alexa, Cortana or Siri.

3. Push notifications on the device