Open The Door

The door bell
The door opener

Inspiration

For the hardworking Roboyans, entering the Roboy room can be difficult, especially when the key is already borrowed and everyone in the room is too busy to pay attention to Telegram chat. So we want to make a door bell, which rings when somebody send the "door please" sticker in the group. In addition, if possible, we hope that we can directly open the door by telegram.

What it does

It informs the people in the Roboy room to open the door for other Roboyans. It can also directly open the door.

How we built it

We use a Telegram bot to listen to the messages sent in the Roboy group. The bot runs on a Raspberry Pi. We use python to write the code. On the other hand, we use an ESP32 to build a door opener. It controls a motor. After it receives the instruction, the motor will pull a string to press the open button of the door so that the door will open.

Challenges we ran into

Though the Raspberry Pi with the Telegram bot doesn't rely on a specific network to work as long as it has access to the Internet, it needs to be in the same one with the door opener to send instructions to it. However, the WiFi signal downstairs by the door is too weak so we can't establish a stable connection. Therefore in the end we failed to actually open the door directly with Telegram.