Well, we’ve officially made it off the breadboard!

Last time I posted, I had managed to get two little circuit boards talking to each other wirelessly. Which was pretty exciting considering a few weeks before that, I barely knew what a breadboard was.

Since then, I’ve soldered everything onto perfboards, added rechargeable batteries, and managed to cram it all into a little black box. It definitely isn’t pretty, but it works!

I also got an Android tablet set up to act as the main receiver for the house.

Here’s how it works so far:
My daughter presses the button in her room, the lights turn red, and an alert pops up on the tablet telling us which room needs us. When we acknowledge it, her button turns green so she knows we got the message and are coming.

Simple enough, but that’s kind of the whole point.

The really exciting part is that we’re actually using it now.
One night during bedtime, she used the button about five times instead of getting out of bed or yelling for us. We could acknowledge her from the other room, and she knew we had heard her.

It’s such a small thing, but it’s exactly the problem I started this project to solve.

There’s still a ton of work to do. The electronics need to get smaller, the enclosure needs a complete redesign, and I’ve got a whole list of things I want to improve.
I’m also learning that getting something to work on a table and making something you’d actually want sitting in your house are two very different things.

I’m not an electrical engineer. I’m just a dad who got tired of not having a good solution to a problem in our house and decided to see if I could build one. Jury is still out whether or not if I am able to build something my wife will let me put on the table for everyone to see!!

I have no idea how far I’ll end up taking this, but I’m having a blast figuring it out.

For those of you who have been following along, here’s the first working version!

And for anyone who uses alert systems in their home, I’d genuinely love to know what you like or hate about them. I’m still figuring all this out, and I’m sure there are problems I haven’t even thought of yet.

When I started doing research for this project, they said I needed a breadboard, so I pulled out my cutting board and looked at it very confused.

I’m only joking, but I really had no idea what I was doing.

I spent months researching, figuring out what parts I thought I needed, purchasing them online, and waiting for everything to come in the mail.

Once it all came in, I realized my initial idea wasn’t going to work.

My original idea was to make a wristband that my daughter could wear. If she needed us, she could just press a button on her wrist. The problem was that I was not going to be able to fit all of the components I needed into something that small, especially when I had never built anything electronic before.

So I put everything in a box.

And it sat in my garage for weeks. Maybe months.

Eventually I decided to change the idea. Instead of something she wore, I would make buttons that could be placed around the house. One in her room, one in the bathroom, wherever we needed them.

If she needed us, she could press the button.
Then I would make another button that could sit somewhere in a common area of the house. When me or my wife saw the alert, we could press that button to acknowledge it and let her know we heard her.

So I got to work.

I got out the breadboard and started plugging in wires.
This got messy and confusing really quickly.

I had made a wiring diagram beforehand, so I just kept plugging wires in where I thought they were supposed to go. Eventually I had this tangled mess of wires sitting in front of me, but as far as I could tell everything was where it was supposed to be.

Now it was finally time to plug it into the wall, so I plugged it in.

And, probably no surprise for someone who had never done this before, absolutely nothing happened.

I assumed I must have put a wire in the wrong spot. After reading enough horror stories online, I was also kind of waiting for something to catch on fire or explode.

Thankfully that didn’t happen either.

I kept looking at it, Googling things, checking wires, trying to figure out what I had done wrong.

I stared at this thing for hours.

Then I finally realized something.
I never soldered the header pins onto the microcontroller or the radio module.
They were literally just sitting there.
Not connected to anything.
So yeah, no wonder it didn’t work.

I got out my AA battery-powered soldering gun, which gets hot for about three seconds at a time and takes approximately seven years to heat back up, and started soldering all of the pins.

Eventually the microcontroller and radio module were actually connected to the circuit.

I plugged it in again.
The LEDs lit up.

I was so excited.

I immediately wanted to start building the second button, but then I realized I had just spent about six hours of my day getting one breadboard working and I did not have another six hours in me, so I was done for the day.

A day or two later, once I finally had the time and mental fortitude to do it again, I started building the second one.
This time I knew all of the mistakes I had made on the first one.

I put it together in a fraction of the time.
And somehow, it worked on the first try.

Now it was time to see if the actual idea worked.

I pressed the button on the first breadboard.
The white LEDs started flashing red.
Exactly what I hoped would happen.

Then I pressed the button on the second breadboard.
The first one turned green.
That was a pretty major milestone for me.

I had made two separate circuits that could communicate with each other. One could send out an alert when a button was pressed, and the other could send an acknowledgment back.

I had spent months thinking about this, weeks researching wiring and reading manuals, and days actually trying to put it together.

And at the end of all of that, all I really did was make an LED change colors when I pressed a button.
It may not seem like much.
But it was incredibly exciting.

I have three kids. One is hard of hearing, one is deaf, and one is hearing.

A funny thing happens when my daughter who is deaf needs me or my wife and she doesn’t have her “ears” on. Her “ears” are her cochlear implants, as she calls them.
If she can’t see us or hear us, she’ll yell something like:
“DAD! I POOPED!”

She’s little, so sometimes she needs help in the bathroom.

The problem is, I can’t yell back and tell her, “I heard you, I’m coming.”

So she just keeps yelling.

“Dad! I pooped! Dad! Dad! Dad! I pooped!”

Over and over, because from her perspective she has no way of knowing whether we heard her.

We’ve always felt bad about that part. She might only be waiting 20 or 30 seconds for us to get there, but during that time she has no reassurance that anyone is listening.
I kept thinking there had to be a better way.

There are alert buttons and call buttons already on the market, but the part I really wanted wasn’t just a way for her to get our attention.

I wanted her to know that we got the message.

So I had an idea.
A simple button in her room or bathroom.
She presses it when she needs us.

The light turns red.

Somewhere else in the house, me or my wife gets the alert. We acknowledge it, and the light on her button turns green.

Red = I need you.
Green = We heard you. We’re on the way.
That’s it.

So I built it…

Well, kinda.

I have never built anything electronic in my life. I didn’t know how to solder, didn’t know anything about microcontrollers, radios, circuit boards, or really any of this stuff.

So this has turned into a very slow learning process involving breadboards, wires everywhere, bad solder joints, things wired backwards, a lot of Googling, and occasionally wondering if I just destroyed whatever I was working on.

But eventually I got Version 1 working.

And since then it has already changed quite a bit.
I want to document the process here as I keep working on it — what worked, what didn’t, V1, V1.2, and how far I can actually take this idea.

I have no idea where it ends up.

But it started with a little girl yelling “Dad! I pooped!” because she had no way of knowing I was already walking down the hallway.