MonIEEEtor

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  Card accepted, ready to work!

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  Card declined, no access :(

Inspiration

The IEEE lab is often times left a mess, particularly at the soldering stations. It is quite difficult to keep an eye on who is making this mess, and the mess detracts from everyone's experience because it makes work less fun. Furthermore, some students decide to use equipment that they have not completed the required safety trainings for, creating a potentially unsafe environment in the lab. This issue is compounded by the fact that manually checking the safety trainings is a long and tedious process.

Now in videogames, you have often times have scores and achievements. What better way than to game-ify the lab than to count safety trainings as achievements and reward (or punish!) people for how they treat the lab by giving (or removing) points on a leaderboard? This way, everyone is safe, and the process is enforceable.

What it does

Our device restricts access by checking that the person using the tool has completed the required trainings. By scanning the ID of the card inserted into the device, it is possible to check the person's safety trainings against a central database, and grant/deny them access based on the trainings completed. Furthermore, if the person using the equipment leaves a mess or is unsafe, it is possible to suspend their privileges to ensure a safer and cleaner lab environment.

How we built it

We built it using an ESP32, an RFID card reader, a couple of discrete components, and a 3d printed enclosure. The ESP32 was picked because it has wireless connectivity built into the microcontroller. An RFID card reader was picked because it was the only option available. A 3d printed enclosure was designed and printed to give the project a professional look.

Challenges we ran into

We had issues with writing the web server that managed determined whether a certain ID was valid or not. Part of the problem was that none us had any real web experience, so it was a process to learn what we were doing. It would have been easy to port our web server (which we wrote in Python) to Google Cloud, but we were not able to do so due to time constraints.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our idea, and of the fact that our device works and has potential as a safety device for makerspaces and labs in schools!

What we learned

We learned a lot about wireless communications and how to design servers. Our te?am was already fairly well versed in hardware as our team consisted of two electrical engineers and one mechanical engineer. Therefore, picking and programming the microcontroller and designing the 3d printed enclosure was a breeze. However, figuring out how to interface with the internet was a challenge. Therefore, we had to learn how to do it from scratch, which was quite educational.

What's next for MonIEEEtor

Refine the design and connect a relay to allow it to automatically switch mains voltage on and off. This was not done during the hackathon because it is a bit dangerous and we didn't want to do it while we were lacking sleep. However, it is necessary to actually allow the device to regulate access to various devices.

Built With

• http
• python