It has been a long but fulfilling journey at ALP working on my project together with all my teammates for the last 10 weeks or so! Although everyone had their individual plans, we all still managed to make time to complete our individual tasks. I would like to give a shoutout to all my teammates for their efforts and contribution to making our project a success! It would not have been possible without anyone of them! Although we did not achieve every aspect of the project that we initially set out to do, we fulfilled majority of our goals, creating a working prototype for the presentation. And I would call that a success on our part!
To explain a little more in detail about the workings of my project (sorry but I’m going to bore you with the some technical details), we set out to build a smart wardrobe with a fashion recommendation system. The aim of the project is to create a wardrobe which is able to track the individual clothing that the user owns and to recommend daily outfits to the user based on daily events, user preferences, the frequency of wear, etc. The interaction of the wardrobe and the user is then facilitated through a smart phone application. This project was aimed at creating solution to the problem many people face in which they lose track of all the clothes they own and end up constantly wearing the same set of clothes and even to cater to the less fashion inclined people.
On the hardware side, the wardrobe, we created a rail attachment which had a belt with an RFID scanner on it and a stepper motor to move the system. The RFID scanner is used to identify RFID stickers stuck on individual clothes. Using this system, we are able to track the movement of clothing in and out of the wardrobe. This information is then sent to a Raspberry Pi which sends it to an online database.
On the software side, we made an Android phone application and a user fashion recommendation algorithm. The application allows the user to view daily recommendations made by the algorithm as well as information pertaining to the wardrobe like the items currently inside and the past outfits worn. These information are obtained by the communication of the phone with the online database to retrieve them. A main challenge was trying figure out how to make the application intuitive and easy to navigate for the user.
Many of the other teams too had very impressive and interesting products. Some of which had me wishing I had the chance to join their team! Cheers to everyone for a successful presentation!
This ALP was a very fun and memorable trip. It was a great experience and I learnt a lot! Now it’s time to look forward to going back home to Singapore and eat the many local delicacies I have missed for the last 3 months!
