Components used:
1 - Particle Photon and breadboard
14- RGB LEDs
6 - 1k ohm resistors
1 - Glass bottle
1 - Wooden slab with circular cutout
This was the process we used:
1. The inspiration for this project came from the financial constraints we face when we eat and drink out often. As students, we live on a budget and it is not wise to spend too much when we go out. What better way to learn how much you spent on alcohol last night than from a bottle? To better visualize this concept, we started off with free hand sketches and then moved on to a digital prototype before actually building the device.
2. We first worked on the hardware part of the device. 3 RGB LEDs were connected in series as a bundle, 5 of these were made. Since we are tracking the alcohol consumption over a night, we chose to use an elegant olive green wine bottle to create an ambient light which was glance-able, but still clearly indicated it's purpose. A wooden piece was machined and surface-finished to enable the bottle to stand at an angle.
3. The code is designed to track the invoices sent from the bar or restaurant in the form of an email credit card statement, in real time. In the beginning, all the LEDs are green, indicating that you haven't yet started drinking. Each invoice triggers one bundle of LEDs to turn from green to red. When all the LEDs are red, it indicates that no more alcohol must be consumed tonight as you cannot afford any more. The program is designed to refresh and reset the variables every 24 hours.
4. The last part of creating this device involved connecting to the mail inbox through IFTTT to search for keywords that indicate an alcohol purchase at a bar. This triggers a cloud function in the program to change the color of an LED bundle from green to red. As the lights in the bottle are more red than green, it is an indication that you should not buy any more alcohol.
To control the LEDs based on incoming e-mails, IFTTT function was used. The bottle would glow green until a certain email was received, in this case set to "restaurant" which was set to the alert set on Mint spend notification email. Initially, we tried to control the lights by publishing an event, which turned too difficult. Hence, we used the call function. To make the 24 hour reset happen, time.now function was used to track the program start time, track current time, and if the difference between the two is 1, the program will reset to the default state, which would be green lit bottle.
The result was every time a certain amount of money was spent, an email notification would be sent to the user's e-mail, which triggers IFTTT, which triggers the light change. As these accrued, the amount of lights that turn red would change, increasingly making the bottle grow redder.
