Dr. Winfree is a Professor and Associate Director for Undergraduate Programs at the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems at Northern Arizona University. Dr. Winfree is a very active person, and has to be to keep up with his children and the busy engineering capstones he is in charge of each year. The Whiteboard Robot is a project idea that Dr. Winfree thought of in his place of work. Every day he jots ideas, notes, and examples down on his whiteboards located in his office. The problem he found was that he often needed to reference or review the information that was written on his board, but was unable to when out of the office, in class, or at home. Dr. Winfree has asked the AJG Board Team to come up with a solution that will allow for him to view the content, write content, and erase content in-person or remotely to his whiteboard in his office.
The AJG Board Team agreed that The Whiteboard Robot is a quality of life tool that will ensure that professors can access and adjust their notes anytime and anywhere. OneNote, a program developed by Microsoft has many parallels to our project, being able to access content and adjusting it from any computer like device, like a laptop. The main reason that our solution is necessary is that the common whiteboard is not only not a digital technology that can easily relay information, but it is large and not portable. Our solution will work to add a frame above and to one side of the board that will serve as a track for the tools to move vertically and horizontally across the board. The tools we are working with include a whiteboard marker, eraser, camera, raspberry pi, and a couple of motors. Together, these tools will be able to get the information into an easily accessible web location anytime of day. The final product should be able to adapt to any sized whiteboard or glass material, giving the whiteboard a technological leap.
The project that the AJG Board Team was tasked with was to construct a whiteboard robot that could add or remove messages from a whiteboard as well as capture the whiteboards contents and make them accessible remotely. This project was proposed by the team's client, Dr. Kyle Winfree, because he wanted a similar device for his office that would allow him to remotely access his whiteboard as well as add things to it or remove things from it. Dr. Winfree is hoping for a complete version of this project that he can use in his office. He also hopes that the robot could be configured to fit any whiteboard but really only cares about the device working with his whiteboard. If successful this project would help make Dr. Winfree's life a bit easier and a lot more organized.