ÆTHER

Inspiration

One of the team members works as a graduate research assistant in an air quality research lab, currently working on a project developing air quality sensors for smart communities. It was through this work that led to the idea of looking into developing an air quality sensor for smart homes, making use of different technologies such as the Arduino platform, NodeMCU, and Google Cloud to power it.

What it does

The Æremetric Tethered Home Environment Responder, or ÆTHER, currently makes use of a temperature and humidity sensor that is connected to an Arduino Uno. The Uno polls this sensor at a specified time period, creating a JSON document and storing the polled dats before serializing it and sending it via UART communications to an ESP8266, which then deserializes the document to include a timestamp before it is then sent off to Firebase. Firebase stores the data, and the bot calls on the database on command to give a timestamped reading of temperature and humidity at the moment the command is given.

How we built it

On the hardware side, an Arduino Uno and NodeMCU were used, along with a DHT11 sensor. On the software side, we used Python and GitHub integration with visual studio code to build a bot using discord.py documentation. The bot intends to call the database and send messages to the server when different commands are used. On the web side, our developer scripted a site using node.js and html and created a host for the database through a mobile app. This would be the connection between the sensors, the database, and the bot, where JSON data would be received.

Challenges we ran into

We were excited to get to use the sponsored products from Google Cloud. This was completely new to all of us, so figuring out how Firebase and website hosting works was a delightful puzzle that continues to motivate and bewilder us. On the hardware side, memory management introduced due to the usage of JSON documents in the serialization of sensor data. On the software side, discord.py and GitHub unfamiliarity slowed production.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

ShellHacks was the first hackathon one of our team members has participated in, and came in unfamiliar with a lot of the dev tools the rest of the team has used. Despite this, they excelled in their role and was not hesitant in reaching out for help from the rest of the team.

What we learned

Due to the triple-pronged nature of the project, each member was able to work at their own level and push themselves to new heights. Our hardware-oriented member had a learning curve with the firebase database working and using JSON data with an arduino board. Our web-savvy member also had a learning curve with firebase hosting as well as website frontend development. Our software engineer was completely new to hackathons, and bot building. She learned to use GitHub and Virtual Studio like never before, and also stuck it out learning the syntax for discord.py in a trial by fire.

What's next for ÆTHER

We plan to continue working on the hardware aspect as we design the site to be more intuitive. There are also plans for a mobile application and more functionality with the discord bot.