Shelter Finder

Current number of available spaces
Message notifying that there is no available spaces
Message showing the nearest available shelter

Goal

We've learned from the news that many homeless people die due to inability or difficulty to find shelters and we want to improve this process to make sure shelters can accommodate people to its maximum extent. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/homeless-deaths-toronto-public-health-1.4509218

What it does

This device counts the number of people staying at a shelter and makes this number accessible via REST API service. Such approach allows us to display this information on LCD displays at shelter locations, as well as online.

How we built it

We used components provided by the hackathon hosts which included Huzzah esp8266 microcontroller, Quapass LCD module, push buttons (which imitate a potential turnstile trigger). We connected it to AWS IoT Platform, which uses Lambda functions to update NoSQL database and talks to Google Maps API to return the location of the nearest shelter, as well as the number of available spaces there.

Challenges we ran into

Lack of documentation for provided hardware modules and integrations with Watson IoT Platform. This made us decide to go with AWS IoT Platform and AWS Lambda integration.