Where It All Began

May 2nd, 2015

For a while now, we have been thinking about creating an iPad app that will allow mom to voice control her electric-powered hospital bed. After doing some research, we think that it is actually quite a realistic goal. We are modeling much of our project off a garage door-opener project that we saw online (created by Delian Asparouhov). If it works, she will be able to tell Siri to tilt her bed up or down, and the bed will then do so for a set time interval. 

All it takes: an Arduino Blend board, a relay board, lots of wires, a 9-pin serial plug, a mac computer for programming, a 9V power adapter, an iPad, and a mission.

We downloaded Arduino IDE and followed the "getting started with Arduino" instructions on creating a program that would light an LED light and then turn it off every second. We modified the program to include two bulbs, where one went on, the other went on, one went off, and the other went off. We wired a breadboard to make it work, which enabled us to have multiple wires connecting to the same port. In this exercise, I learned how relays work to electromagnetically output a much larger current than what they originally received. I was able to do much of the coding for the testing because I am familiar with the similar Processing environment.

In sum, OUR MISSION is to create 4 iPad apps to be activated by Siri to open 4 different switches that either raise, lower, or adjust the knees on my mom's hospital bed so that she can be more independent in making herself comfortable.