Inspiration
Pot holes suck and it's hard to fix them.
What it does
We put an IOT box on your car with a bunch of sensors. We tell when you go over a pothole, and when you do we register it on a map and send a tweet.
How we built it
We hooked up a bunch of sensors to an Intel Edison that can tell when you hit a pothole. We then used MQTT (a low bandwidth protocol) to have the Edison ping our server whenever one is hit. Our server is hosted on a Raspberry Pi, and is capable of displaying a map of the known potholes with the Google Map API, and tweets every time it sees a new pothole.
Challenges we ran into
Getting the accelerometer working with the Edison was difficult, and we couldn't get the Raspberry Pi working until we managed to find a monitor.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The map and Twitter feed are pretty great, and getting the whole system to run on two single-board computers is even better.
What we learned
We figured out the MQTT protocol and how to use both the Raspberry Pi and the Intel Edison. In writing the backend we also learned a ton about Flask, SQLite, and the Google Maps and Twitter APIs.
What's next for Pothole Vigilante
Whenever Gotham is in danger of suspension breakage, we want it to turn on a spotlight aimed at the clouds with a picture of a giant pothole on it.
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