A maker/thinkerer who could maybe help

witnessmenow

Hello all,

My name is Brian and one of my hobbies is building Arduino and electronics projects, which is kind of a hard thing to summarise in one sentence!

Basically they can be used to build devices that do all sorts of things, for example one of the things I'm working on at the moment is a foot pedal controlled remote camera trigger for my phone that connects to via Bluetooth (as seen here).

Making my phones camera trigger using a foot pedal is all well and good, but it's not exactly the most valuable thing! But that kind of project could maybe put to better use to help people out.

I haven't exactly formulated what I want to say in this post but I have been thinking for a while that some of knowledge with this types projects could potentially be used to solve problems for people, If I knew what the problems were!

I have been thinking about this for a while, but I came across a website in the US called Atmakers.org, where they try pair people up in need of Assistance Technology with people with similar interests to me. And I thought I may as well make the first step of trying to find out what kind of problems I could help with.

Currently I don't have a huge amount of free time ( getting married in a few weeks), but I thought it might be a good idea to get the conversation started to see if there was smaller projects that might help.

I'm not looking to make money out of this or anything, most of the parts of these kind of projects would be pretty cheap so unless there is something excessive I can probable cover costs of them.

I guess it might be hard for people to think about what things I could potentially help with, and to it's hard for me to list some as I don't really know the problems but I'll try give some.

• Work with universal remotes for TVs, including "integraiton" with Amazon Echo (command needs to be in the following format, "Alexa Turn TV Volume On/Off")
• I seen a project this week where a door bell sends a message to a phone for someone who is hard of hearing
• Adding WiFi controls to a lamp so it could be turned off via phone/Alexa
• Automated plant watering could be possible
• Looking through the forum I saw a request for a automated page turner, potentially possible but probably a biggish project.

As mentioned I am pretty busy at the moment, but it could be a case of more people than just me being interested in helping out, there are a few maker spaces in the cities that I would imagine would have people who like to help as well.

If you have any questions or suggestions of things please post here and I'll do my best to help!

Brian