The Urban Vigilante Toolkit is a fun course project that helps people passive aggressively shame others for not doing the right thing. This toolkit consist of three devices to tackle varies use cases:

• Stay Shushed, Stupid! (SSS): Detects sound and shush people

• Drunk DumDum Detector (DDD): Detects alcohol and locks user’s smartphone

• The Trash Talk (TTT): Detects the type of trash thrown in it and gets angry when people don't recycle

Solution (1/3): Stay Shushed, Stupid! (SSS)

Ever want to shut someone up but too shy or timid to do so? This device will shut people up to maintain a quiet space for all.

SSS simply detects surrounding sound level and shush people when needed. A sound detector constantly collect the decibel level of the environment. When it’s too loud, the speaker broadcast messages to quiet people down. The system is designed into a face with the speaker and an LED panel as eyes, the sound detector as the nose, and 3 colored LEDs as the mouth to bring a sense of empathy to people. The language SSS uses gets increasingly aggressive when the environment does not get quieter.

Blueprint

Assembling

Solution (2/3): Drunk Dumdum Detector (DDD)

Don't let your drunk self destroy your normal life. This device will prevent you from being a dum dum when you are intoxicated by physically locking your phone!

DDD is a smartphone case that can only be unlocked when you are sober. An Alcohol Gas Sensor is wired to our particle system that serves as a breathalyzer. When you breath into it, it immediately locks the case with a small motor if you are drunk and won’t unlock for a while. You still see messages since DDD only locks the home button so you don’t miss important messages but cannot drunk text your ex-girlfriend for sure.

Blueprint

Assembling

Solution (3/3): The Trash Talk

Humans are inconsiderate to the environment and most people do not recycle. We want to encourage humans to be conscious of the trash they throw out!

TTT is a smart trashcan that detects the object thrown into itself and react based on if it’s the right type of trash. This solution is the most complicated system as it contains two computing systems with multiple input/output sources.

The image recognition is provided by Google’s vision chip running on a Raspberry Pi. The camera coming with the kit captures image and send the visual data to the Raspberry Pi. Then a Python code was written to call the vision kit to return the identification of the object. Finally, based on the object, the Raspberry Pi system sends a signal to the particle system over Wi-Fi, which activates either the speaker, the actuator, or both for the output.

Blueprint

Assembling

Sidetrack

Apparently we were not the only ones to think of the idea of a talking trashcan. However, Sweden did it with much more “positivity” than us:

Other contributor: Janice Chen