Hackdays@Andela

Final UI for the Vibez Sonos Controller.

Hackathons are a great way to get creative and build things you would otherwise not have the time or the motivation to do so. Participating at Andela’s first internal #hackdays was one such occasion. This first hackathon was open to only members of the technology team. There were nine teams in totally with a minimum headcount of 2 for each team. Team Vibez–a play on good vibes–comprised of two engineers–myself, Jumoke Oladimeji–and a product coordinator, Sharon Telewa. and we called ourselves Vibez–a play on good vibes. The idea we settled on solved a problem that occurs quite often at offices and workspaces that use shared music services like Sonos.

A post on slack raising concerns about the lyrical content and volume level of music played in the office.

Problem

In an office space that uses a shared music streaming system like Sonos, it is difficult to control what is played in terms of lyrical content (crude, vulgar, etc), volume level, etc. This can lead to a less than ideal work environment for colleagues and others at the in the office.

Solution

A custom controller for the Sonos line of products that will run a profanity check on all song lyrics in the background to ensure that the song being played matches some predefined preferences (i.e content rating is PG vs R).

Quick sketch of what we had in mind before starting to build.

How it works

The Vibez controller discovers the Sonos device on the local network, then it finds and fetches the lyrics of the song currently playing and runs it through the profanity detection algorithm. If the lyrics contain any vulgarities and the predefined rating on content is R, the song is skipped.

Technologies used

Hardware

• Sonos Connect + JBL Flip3 Bluetooth speakers

Software

• MusicXmatch library to get song lyrics
• Node-Sonos — Sonos Media Player Interface/Client
• A profanity detection algorithm which employs NLP from Algorithmia
• Music player styles by Shayan

Demo

Here’s a demo of what we built.

What’s next?

• Make source code publicly available and port code to an executable for all platforms using electron.

Only good vibes!

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