Inspiration
We have all had that moment in the library. You step away for just a minute, but your bag suddenly feels like it is balancing on a cliff edge.
That feeling sparked our idea. We wanted a simple surveillance system that could quietly watch over your belongings while you focus on what actually matters. Something small, smart, and reliable that stands guard so you do not have to.
The goal is simple: give students and professors the peace of mind they deserve, turning moments of worry into uninterrupted productivity.
What it does
It’s a compact monitoring system that uses the student’s phone camera, hidden in a penguin case, to detect suspicious activity. An ultrasonic sensor adds a second layer by measuring distance and detecting movement nearby, helping alert the system if someone walks past.
How we built it
Immediately we made a decision on creating 'Pengwin' using the Uno Q board combining it's MPU and MCU tandemness to connect to devices and monitor spaces in real time. We created a repository on git to constantly update and monitor our project as well as using python and c++ together and learning how to use linux debian distro.
Challenges we ran into
We had many memory issues with the qualcomm being unable to import libraries for our code or when our code would work it would mysteriously brick itself. After tribulations at every single step we still continued.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were proud of actually having achieved our goals of computer vision and making our innovative strategy of monitoring presence of a person using bluetooth signal strength. We were also proud to preserve even when our solutions crumbled before us and it taught us the importance of documenting your wins.
What we learned
We learnt a lot from technical issues and developing work such as the issues of using cv2 library and bluetooth, working with linux memory and wiring protocols of our project. As well the importance of constant documentation and project requirements.
What's next for Pengwin
What's next is adding the features we unfortunately didn't have time for. A couple of features that come to mind are notifications that are sent to the phone that can showcase the history of what was going on while you were gone. We can also have LLM to make a short summary of what was going on while the user was gone. Something we wanted to implement and were close to is TTS via elevenLabs, having the system to play custom TTS audio. There were also pomodora timers, bluetooth device strength tracking and different surveillance modes.
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