Smart Bookshelves

A smart bookshelf tells you where the book you're looking for is and where to put back a book you've previously borrowed.

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Inspiration

We got our inspiration for this project when we knew we wanted to do something physical but we weren't quite sure what. Our original plan was a smart lawnmower, but I guess that didn't fly. We were in such close proximity to a library however, so why not make a robot that would be useful in a library?

What it does

So we have a simple website to search for a book of your choice. When you find the book, you can request it, and the website should instruct the smart bookshelf where the book is located to protrude the book the user is looking for to be picked up easily.

When they want to return the book, you go to the same website and ask to return it. The bookshelf where it is will now tell you where it goes back.

How we built it

We have two parts to this. A website that you request or return the book from and a makeshift smart bookshelf that's hooked up to an arduino with LEDs and actuators.

For the website, we used a combination of HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The webserver runs on Java and the arduino uses a custom version of C++.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into is that the arduino we have does not have a built-in Wifi card, and there is no network extension to go with it. So, our website wasn't really capable of communicating with the Arduino. The only challenge is that bridging these two pieces isn't possible with our current setup.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Separately, the arduino and website work great! We have a functional website with a lookup feature and we have a functional arduino that can push out different books based on choices.

What we learned

We learned that we need to plan out all aspects of our project before getting into it. We could have certainly reevaluated our project if we knew beforehand that the arduino we had came with such limitations. Aside from that, we learned very vaguely how AWS works and what sort of things we could do with it.

What's next for Smart Bookshelves

Quite frankly, it was never realized to its full potential. If we could have Wifi-enabled arduinos, we could have done something a lot more impressive without stretching beyond the boundaries of the goals we had already set.

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