Soteria

Inspiration

While thinking about the state of travelling today, our team has been really saddened to see the effect that COVID has had on areas that depend on tourism revenue to survive. For this Makeathon, we wanted to build something that might help struggling venues and businesses that benefit from travel return to a more stable state by helping eliminate some of the barriers that make it difficult for tourists to travel or enjoy their vacations. The inspiration behind the name 'Soteria' was from the Greek goddess of the same name, who was the entity responsible for safety and salvation, deliverance, and preservation from harm. And we felt that her name is best suited for our project which has the same purpose.

What it does

Monitor indoor air quality and environment using onboard sensors. -Identify conditions that may be uncomfortable for those with chronic lung conditions or allergic to fine dust.
Detect hazardous conditions and find their source using autonomous technology.
Send data over the internet for caretakers to be alarmed or informed about when a place needs assistance regarding the risk of increased air quality index.
Provide real-time data to people about the conditions of their staying place/room over the internet which will create greater transparency between businesses and tourists.

How we built it

We built the system using the ESP32 microcontroller as the brain of the system and a few sensors like the DHt11, for the temperature and humidity content in that area, the mq135 for the CO2 content in the air, the hcsr04 ultrasonic distance sensor for the distance measurement and making the decision which way to go. Along with that, we used a servo to rotate the hcsr04 to the left and right direction. We were initially using the l293d motor driver for driving the motors, but later we changed it to relay control since we, unfortunately, fried it 😦 oops! However, we overcame that with a quick solution by using the relays. 😁 We used google Firebase to publish the data so that it can be read by the UI front end that we made as well. A node.js server gets live updates from firebase DB and sends to a frontend dashboard application built in react.js.

Challenges we ran into

Having a hardware and software working on this project from different continents. Both of us are more experienced with backend/hardware development so it was fun but challenges to make a front-end dashboard

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were really happy to have finished the project in just 24 hours and overcame almost all the technical challenges that we faced.

What we learned

We learned about the different aspects of hardware and software that we both worked on respectively.

What's next for Soteria

We want to equip the Soteria autonomous rover with emergency tools that can inform others as well as take respective measures to minimize hazardous conditions inside the building, be it door and window unlocking capabilities or that of fire extinguishing. Another goal we have next is to smooth out the interface further and continue working on it for making it a marketable device.