PAFWASA: Personal Assistant for Weather and Style Advice

P ersonal
A assistant
F or
W eather
A nd
S tyle 
A dvice

Haven't you ever woken up in the morning, opened up your closet and thought what you were going to wear? You spend 15 minutes of your morning standing and staring at your clothes, wondering what you are going to put on. And THEN, after you put clothes on, you realize you forgot to check the weather to make sure your dress attire coincides with this extremely inconsistent New York City weather. And upon checking, you realize it is scorching hot out (although mid-February) and you have to completely start all over again! It's a mess! 

Well, we have created an everyday solution to this mess, thanks to PAFWASA! PAFWASA is a personal assistant whose job is to assist its user in general weather advice and style tips the second he/she wakes up in the morning and opens his/her closet to start the day. 

PAFWASA lives in your closet (or a drawer if your wish). Assuming the closet light is turned on every day he/she enters for use, PAFWASA comes to life, which is simply an integrated circuit that incorporates processing for the user's benefit.

The Initial Mock Up (click link) is our initial mock-up and sketch/plan on what we wanted to do with our midterm project. Our plans have generally stayed on the same path, although have veered in some more concentrated directions. 

The way PAFWASA works is simple. It lives inside its own, aesthetically pleasing case. The Arduino is fairly simple as well, which includes a photoresistor circuit. Basically, the way we planned and implemented the circuit was so that once the light is turned on in the closet, it is intercepted by the photoresistor, whose data is then sent to Processing, thus turning PAFWASA on. If no light is on, PAFWASA is off. 

After we built the circuit, we had to figure out the best way to write the code. We went through a few trial and error phases with the processing code, especially because the Yahoo Weather API, which we were using to access the live weather data, was extremely frustrating and difficult to implement at the beginning. Ultimately, we figured it out, and below you can see the code for processing and arduino.

We spent a long time toying around with the processing code to work out all the scenarios we have developped: how we would display the certain screens and the music visualizer in Processing, scroll through different conditions (cities/weather info pages), and what would happen if we keep opening and closing the box based. We had to figure out a lot of different instances to make sure our PAFWASA work the most efficiently! 

The Arduino circuit for the PAFWASA

We then made a box. An important thing to note here is that, the point of this specific object is that it can stand alone on its own, without be attached to any cords or computers. So, we planned to implement the Adafruit Ez-link bluetooth board to the arduino, which would be able to communicate its serial information with the computer, thus no USB connection necessary. Our power would also be drawn from a battery pack which would be attached to the arduino, therefore the box can be picked up, thrown around, and placed wherever you would like...while having your own personal computer screen staying on your bed, or your tablet mounted somewhere on wall. We could not figure out how to connect the bluetooth device, which we will hope to figure out with the help of Constantine in the coming days. So for now, the assignment will have a wired connection to the computer for communication. 

Basically, the case itself is like a drawer. This means that you can slide out the drawer a tad yourself to let some light seep into the photoresistor to activate your personal assistant.

A picture showing the scenario when the drawer is open. 

The screen recording demo:

The walkthrough demo:

Pitfalls and Screwballs:

• would have been nice to implement the bluetooth device for wireless communication 
• Yahoo Weather API was extremely difficult to implement into Processing, so needed a lot of practice to figure out how to do it correctly
• difficult initially to figure out the corresponding conditions for each clothing recommendation 
  
  
  Processing Difficulties: 
• delays in processing screen because of the sending of data from yahoo server 
• trying to create the perfect threshold from the photoresistor serial data readings 

What We Can Do to Make it Better:

• first of all, this can be A LOT smaller...to actually make it scalable and a profitable endeavor, we would need to make it the size of maybe a thumb or external hard drive, which is totally doable by the way
• enable bluetooth connectivity 
• include a lot more style tips and advice 
• maybe even have the user be able to search a city while its running to see that city's information 
• maybe have Siri-like voice speaking the style tips 

Blog article written by Zack Kimelheim

Team Members: Siyuan Hu, Zack Kimelheim