Inspiration
Since one of the topics was Smart City, we wanted to create something that can improve something that is often overlooked, and that is the cities manholes. Lots of manholes are either misplaced (i.e. tilted) or stolen. That becomes a safety hazard for everyone. One could get hurt if they were to accidently walked on them. We wanted to develop a device that can help minimize (or maybe prevent) that from happening.
When approaching the Smart City theme, we decided to consider various issues that Toronto is facing. Theft being one of them. That combined with the city’s frequent construction brought our attention to manholes. The displacement of these can cause great issues to safety as well as potentially the city’s underground system, which is why we began this project to tackle this issue.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We all came out of this project learning many new skills or enhancing previously acquired skills such as HTML, CSS, git, using hardware, etc. Our team came into this project not knowing how to connect the front-end to the back-end to the hardware, so we’re proud that in the end, everything came together and worked out. We were all able to learn something from this.
What we learned
We all learned skills from taking on each part of the code.
In front-end, we learned HTML/CSS and navigated through various problems through creativity. A fun part of the process was trying to figure out how to incorporate our project into something simple like buttons to really personalize the website. We came up with the idea of a manhole cover as the button, which when hovered on, “opens up” like a manhole cover.
In backend, we learned how to use google cloud, how to connect to google cloud virtual machines, how to use mySQL with proper data types and default values, and how to design API endpoints better.
In hardware, We learned how to read raw acceleration and rotation data from MPU6050 gyroscope module and convert them to correct units. We also learned about converting data in json format and send them to the backend server using ESP8266 IoT module. We also implemented a circular buffer with C++ to store the most recent sensor data.
Ultimately, the biggest thing we all learned is how to put all three of these aspects together to make a complete working code that interacts with each and every part.
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