Inspiration

As university usually refers to a complex of several buildings with a large number of classrooms and laboratories it is nearly impossible to personally monitor the events happening in each of them. Having a proper system dedicated to controlling happenings in the university rooms would not only make it easier to manage electrical devices by enabling remote control but also provide students and teachers with useful information before entering the class.

What it does

We have created a system that collects information such as light intensity in the room, number of present people, temperature, humidity and sends it via secure MQTT broker hosted on our own server into our InfluxDB datastore. Stored data is subsequently used to create Grafana dashboards with up-to-date information while remote control of electrical devices can be managed using node-red dashboard.

Challenges we ran into

Each member of the team lives in different location so it was a challenge to work remotely especially as regards putting together hardware components of the system and ensuring proper communication between individual sensors. Setting up a server using DigitalOcean was another challenge which appeared to be much more time consuming than expected. Micropython and time series database InfluxDB was quite a challenge for us as well because we did not have much experience in this field.