Xela – Reflections
Manan-Jigar Gandhi
Advisor: Luisa Pereira
Xela Reflections integrates physical and digital experiences to capture, organize, and thoughtfully prompt your personal reflections, sparking continuous creativity and deeper self-awareness.
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Project Description
In a world dominated by constant consumption, Xela Reflections revitalizes the act of mindful production. Designed as a personal reflection aid, Xela blends physical presence with digital interaction, encouraging users to capture spontaneous thoughts, images, and reflections effortlessly. At its heart lies a compact, beautifully crafted physical server—accessible over both local and remote networks via the companion Xela mobile app. Users input and store their creations, which are indexed and then used by Xela’s reflection engine to periodically generate personalized, thought-provoking prompts. These prompts, accessible via the app and displayed elegantly on the device’s integrated LCD, initiate a continuous cycle of mindful reflection and creative exploration. Xela thus becomes an evolving personal archive, nurturing deeper self-awareness and stimulating ongoing creativity.
Technical Details
Hardware:
- Custom-designed physical enclosure (3D-printed and CNC-machined components)
- Raspberry Pi 5 as core computing unit
- Round LCD display for prompt visualization and moon phase
- Real-time clock (RTC) module for accurate timekeeping
- Ambient light sensor for automatic brightness adjustment
Software & Libraries:
- Obsidian for content storage and knowledge indexing
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline using OpenAI GPT API
- Tailscale for secure remote accessibility over the internet
- Node.js and React Native for mobile/web application front-end
- Python-based backend using Flask/FastAPI for prompt generation and data handling
- SQLite for lightweight data management
- Docker for easy deployment and maintenance