Honey I'm Home!

Inspiration

I'm a part of the Association of Computer Engineers at UF (ACE). We have an office and we regularly host office hours and people stop by to pick up football tickets for our block. Lately, I've noticed quite the logistical issue. Our executive board will have office hours but they won't actually show up. Our members will message us asking if we're in the office when there are no office hours. I thought, wouldn't it be neat to have a webapp that can let you know instantly whether the office door is open or not and that's how this whole thing started.

What it does && how I built it

By using an IR sensor I can sense an output within a certain thresh hold. I wrote a script to calculate an average reading and using that I am able to detect the voltages. When the output dips below 1.5 V, the sensor is very close to a plane. This means the door is ajar which implies the office is open. The opposite implies the office is closed.

Challenges I ran into

I had a difficult time interfacing my hardware with software and deploying it with a webapp. I submitted a help ticket and I am still waiting for a response. I felt like this part would have been much easier with my Raspberry Pi but since I didn't have a monitor, this implementation's going to have to wait for when I get home.

What I learned

Web development is hard.

What's next for Honey I'm Home!

Scalability

This can be applied to an entire office. Coupled with a neat scheduling dashboard it would be an efficient way of checking whether bathrooms are occupied, or conference rooms are taken. Through the dashboard you could make reservations on the fly, look at the history of a space and see when it's busiest.

Issues

One major issue is the fact that a door being ajar does not mean someone's in the room. Or even that the right people are in the room. In my case, ACE shares an office with another student org called Humans vs. Zombies. When people ideally check our webapp they'd see the door is open, they'd stop by, only to be disappointed because HvZ is there and not ACE.

A solution is to integrate the webapp with Google calendar API's. Using this, the webapp can make 'predictions'. If the office is open and someone is hosting office hours, it's highly likely that that person is in their office hours. If the office is open but someone isn't hosting office hours, it's likely someone else just visiting or the other organization is in their office hours. If the office door is closed and someone should be hosting office hours there should be an option to ping them and possibly integrate that with Slack.

What sets me apart from other competitors

I got character.

Built With

• cpld
• hardware
• ir-sensor
• javascript
• ootb
• waveforms