SmartPass

Aarush Kandukoori, Ethan Gracias, Sameen Tanveer

Inspiration

All Teachers know that when students spend time outside in the hallways, they are losing valuable time that could be spent learning inside the classroom. Students need the ability to know how long is too long and when they should be heading back to the classroom where a normal hall pass can’t do the job. That’s where SmartPass comes in.

What it does

SmartPass is a pass that can help students and teachers manage time outside the classroom and know when it is time to come back to learning. When a student wants to use the SmartPass for going to the bathroom, getting water or talking to another teacher, they can ask the teacher for it. The teacher can then start the SmartPass with the click of a button and then the countdown starts. During the time period that the student is in the halls, the SmartPass will turn on a green LED when they have over half their allocated time left. The SmartPass gives an alert 1 minute before they have to return to the classroom with a red LED. When the countdown is up and the button was not already pressed to indicate that the student hasn’t came back from their hall time, the SmartPass starts making noise to indicate that a student has spent too much time outside and must return back to the classroom. This ensures that the student does not spend too much time in the halls and learns in the classroom.

How we built it

The SmartPass is an Arduino microcontroller based hall pass. The components we used are an Arduino ESP32 which has a HC-05 bluetooth module, green & red LED,and a pushbutton. We used Arduino Java to program the SmartPass. We used constant int variables for the pins, setup the pins and serial monitor to display and an if statement in the void loop() to check if the countdown is started by the teacher.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many challenges such as: Software issues like code not compiling because of errors and unintended functions of the program Hardware issues like the wiring being loose, the bluetooth signals being nonexistent with the phone, the LEDs short circuiting because we forgot to use the right kΩ resistor and other issues where the problem just solved itself

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of how we were able to come up with the idea, implement the software and hardware together through our collaborative efforts. We are also proud of our video and how efficiently we worked together and filmed and edited our video.

What we learned

We learned how to use many different platforms to create our project. We also learned how to integrate the hardware and software to create our project. We also learned how to collaborate with each other and troubleshoot all the issues.

What's next for SmartPass - A Unique Hallway Management tool for Teachers

We plan on doing a couple things with this idea as we see it having real life applications even beyond the competition. We will be testing it out and the feasibility of it with teachers at our school, Poolesville High School and getting feedback to see what improvements we should make to our design. We will also keep following the design cycle to keep perfecting our device. We believe ultimately that this device really can save time for students.