PiSight

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Inspiration

Hundreds of thousands of hours are wasted by people every year simply from being stuck in traffic or stuck in a crowd. Imagine a world where not only were crowds able to be dispersed faster, but you could be made aware of where the traffic was and how to avoid it.

What it does

Our solution is a system of Raspberry Pi computers which, together, are able to monitor where people are based on the wifi signals from their cell phones. Through this system, we are able to determine how many people are in an area, how quickly they are entering and leaving the area and, through tracking their MAC addresses, we are even able to identify individual users.

How We built it

One centralized, secure master server with a network of Raspberry pi powered nodes feeding it information on all active WiFi devices in the area.

Challenges We ran into

We were slow to start because we were unable to implement both of our original ideas to to hardware problems. The most difficult parts of this challenge was learning how to program in flask. It is a backend that none of the team were familiar with. Figuring how to to integrate both the raspberry pi with our server was also a major challenge. We faced many hardware issues involving the raspberry pie involving range, booting, and data corruption.

Accomplishments that We're proud of

We are significantlly proud of accomplishing a system that can scrape the MAC addresses off of hardware and creating a database that can accurately present it. It was a challenge hosting that database on our server and we feel very accomplished to have created a such an integrated syste, that can be used by many different people.