Project Continuity Notice

Evolution and deprecation notice regarding the transition from legacy SONA to Guiak.

Official Succession Statement

Guiak is the direct evolution and official successor of the legacy SONA project. The original SONA codebase was conceived as a prototype for the mSchools competition. Following that competition phase, the author evolved the system into Guiak: an independent, personal initiative created to assist visually impaired people in navigating both educational institutes and public buildings. Consequently, the legacy SONA repository is permanently discontinued and will receive no further updates.

From mSchools Competition to an Independent Accessibility Ecosystem

SONA was originally created as an educational prototype to compete in the mSchools contest. While the prototype demonstrated the value of smart door frame beacons in a contest setting, its original architecture was tied strictly to a school-competition scope.

After the contest, author EloyGM decided to evolve the initiative into a personal, indie accessibility project named Guiak. The objective expanded beyond a single contest entry: building a robust, long-term ecosystem designed to empower visually impaired orientation in high schools, universities, municipal buildings, and public facilities.

Architectural Transformation

The original SONA prototype incorporated a monolithic 63 KB on-board HTTP web server running directly on the microcontroller. While suitable for single-device laboratory demonstrations, this architecture presented severe limitations for practical school deployment:

RAM Exhaustion: Serving static assets directly from microcontroller memory left little headroom for real-time digital audio DMA buffers.
Local Network Denial-of-Service: An open HTTP web server on the local school intranet was vulnerable to flooding, intentional disruption, or unauthorized configuration changes by students.
Decentralized Management: Modifying a room name or schedule required connecting to every individual door frame separately.

The Guiak Solution

Guiak strips out the on-board web server entirely. Doorway nodes function purely as outbound HTTPS clients connecting to Firebase Realtime Database.

This architecture closes all incoming network listening ports, makes nodes immune to local subnet denial-of-service, and enables a single cloud console to update hundreds of classroom door frames in milliseconds.

Active Repository

All active development, releases, and schematics are hosted at:
https://github.com/EloyGMDev/guiak

Free Use in Schools and Institutes

All high schools and educational centers may deploy and use Guiak freely without needing to notify or seek authorization from the author.

Development & Accessibility Status

The project is not 100% perfected and remains in active evolution; accessibility for blind individuals in the mobile app continues to be actively refined.