Work/Don't Get Distracted
A robot arm that sees you pick up your phone and pokes you.
A webcam watches the desk while a fine-tuned YOLO model on the laptop scores each frame for "phone in hand". The scores are smoothed over time, and once the smoothed confidence holds above the threshold the Arduino's state machine swings the three-servo arm round to poke you, returns it to rest, and ignores you through a cooldown.
Overview
A desk companion with one job: catch you on your phone and poke you back to work.
Tools
- YOLO
- OpenCV
- Python
- Arduino
- C++
- PWM
- UART
- When
- Nov 2025
- Where
- Columbia Hardware Hackathon
- Role
- Team build
vision.
Teaching YOLO what being on your phone looks like.
Fine-tuned a pretrained YOLO detector on a self-collected dataset of the team's faces and arm positions to tell "phone in hand" from "working".
OpenCV for capture, preprocessing and inference, with tuned confidence thresholds and temporal smoothing to suppress false positives.
arm.
Three servos, a serial link, and a cooldown.
Embedded C++ firmware drives three servos with PWM, talks to the Python host over a UART serial protocol, and runs an on-device state machine with cooldown so the arm pokes, then returns to rest between interrupts.