J.U.P.I.T.E.R.

We are proud to introduce J.U.P.I.T.E.R, an acronym for Just Ur Possibly Invasive Tech-Engineering Robot, as an effective and affordable home security system. Sadly, we were inspired by the recent uptick in home robberies. One of our neighbors' homes was broken into right before the holidays, so we decided that there should be more affordable home security systems on the market. Our unit price for the current system all together, totals around $42 for hardware, not including batteries. With mass production, the unit price for each system would dramatically decrease.

We used Arduino code and microcontrollers, ultrasonic sensors, keyboards, and LCD screens to create our user interface. J.U.P.I.T.E.R has an ultrasonic sensor, door bell, and keypad that sits on the outside of a door, and an LCD that sits inside the house and displays the distance between a person and the door. We also created a doorbell out of a simple circuit using a LED, a piezo, a button and 3V battery. J.U.P.I.T.E.R uses cheap and accessible material to achieve the same goals as other companies such as RING and NEST.

We had challenges wiring and programming the ultrasonic sensor along with soldering pins to our LCD shield before our arrival. The LCDs we used require an abundance of connections and potentiometers to regulate the voltage. Organizing our system and layout in a neat and categorized way proved to be challenging and frustrating. There were many challenges we had to overcome while coding the ultrasonic sensor to display the always changing distance on the LCD. There were many issues figuring out how to have the LCD display the distance in both centimeters and inches while constantly updating the distance. Soldering is a skill that is new to both of us so modifying the LCD shield was a big hurdle we had to overcome.

We are proud of coding and utilizing the ultrasonic sensor because it has accurate detection of approaching objects and people. We are also able to display the distance of the approaching person and translate it between centimeters and inches. Our code allows us to display two lines of text which we used to tell the homeowner the distance of someone in both units of measurement. We are also proud of the low voltage necessary to run our system allowing us to keep the cost low. Both of our LCDs run off a total of 8 AA batteries and our simple circuit for the bell uses a 3V coin battery preventing the homeowner from having to connect the system to their home power grid and saving money long term.

We had also never worked with ultrasonic sensors or LCDs before this project so learning how to code and wire the hardware was both challenging and enlightening. In one of our many trials and errors, we learned how to wire and program a 4x4 matrix keypad that would display the selected key value on an LCD. Although we did not use the keypad, it was engaging and fascinating to learn about the keypad map and connections between rows and columns.

With more time we hope to develop J.U.P.I.T.E.R into an AI that notifies the homeowner via text message or app when someone is approaching the house. Creating an application using Xcode or another app making software is a possible next step. Another possibility includes creating an attachment that includes speakers and microphones or using a camera instead of an ultrasonic sensor. The usage of a camera would increase our accuracy but along with speakers and microphones, the price would increase.

Built With

• arduino