HydroSense

• 

  The HydroSense

Our Team

Matthew Martin Kahmin Keller Gautham Gudipati Sankalp Amaravadi

Inspiration

In Florida alone, there are effects of flooding from hurricane Ian still residing deeply in the state. There are approximately 82,000 water-damaged vehicles still in Florida which can be passed from buyer to buyer while concealing damage that will erupt with regular use. These issues can be a result of cars with maintenance which were not reported to insurance and purposefully sold with superficial care to secure the sale. There may yet be recourse for those who are not in the position to approach such intervention as an inspection through a system to detect humidity levels in vehicles.

What it does

Our project uses an DHT11 sensor to detect humidity and temperature conditions inside a vehicle. If adopted for wider use, the device would be installed inside someone's vehicle to give owners an early warning for potential water damage. Users could connect to a dashboard that visualizes the data collected to give them a greater understanding of the current condition of their vehicle.

How we built it

Our goals for this project were to provide an affordable, effective, and innovative solution to a common problem. To achieve affordability we used the DHT11 and Mega 2560 Rev3, which are easily mass producible and accessible. User understanding is critical to the efficacy of this product, so an easily understandable and operable user interface was a priority for us. To achieve this, we used Streamlit for a quickly deployable and effective user interface.

Challenges we ran into

The first challenge we faced was narrowing down the project ideas and planning for a timely completion and submission. We spent the first day setting clear goals for the project and expectations of each team member. We also set soft and hard deadlines to ensure we would have enough time for every aspect of this project. The next challenge was data collection with the limited hardware we had available to us. We eventually decided on temporarily storing data in the device until it is plugged in via USB for data collection.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

HydroSense being dedicated to providing an accessible solution to our community and those beyond is our greatest accomplishment. Our team is extremely proud of the creativity and hard work towards a safer and more resilient community. We are also proud of our flexibility when it came to addressing unexpected challenges. Our organization and planning allowed us to finish according to schedule despite the obstacles we faced.

What we learned

Over the course of developing HydroSense, we learned a lot about Arduino and low level development. Our team had little experience in projects like this before this hackathon and wanted to try something new to challenge ourselves.

What's next for HydroSense

For future expansions of this project, we plan on collecting data via Bluetooth. In addition to multiple other sensors we are planning to add. Once we are collecting a variety of different types of data, we plan to provide further tracking services to monitor vehicle health.

Built With

• arduino
• c++
• python
• streamlit