CGuard

Inspiration

As international WPI students who were not able to visit Worcester yet, we were worried about theft and crime in the area. We received emails from WPI police about such incidents and decided to act upon this problem for our project

What it does

We created an inexpensive, portable anti-theft tool using Arduino components. This device will send the owner of the vehicle an SMS when suspicious activity is detected. Such suspicious activity includes glass breaking, sudden impact onto vehicle, and vehicle motion. Sensors will detect each of these scenarios and send the owner the SMS as well as GPS location if the owner queries for it.

How we built it

We used Arduino for the hardware. The sensors that we used include an acoustic sensor, an accelerometer, a GPS module, and a GSM module (for the SMS function). Unfortunately, none of our members had the complete set of sensors. We all worked on the components that we individually had available. For the code, we used C/C++. For the acoustic sensor, we made sure that the sensor only responded to the frequency when glass broke. For the accelerometer, it picks up sudden impact through vibrations as well as motion (indicating that the car is moving). The GPS module, accurate to 5m, will send the owner of the car an SMS when queried by them. The GSM module will send the SMS when the sensors are triggered.

Challenges we ran into

• For some of us, working with Arduino is something new.
• All of us had hardware problems. There were some short-circuiting and broken modules.
• We also were very constrained by time as we could not buy additional components.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Learning advanced Arduino in a short time

What we learned

• How to incorporate Fast Fourier Transform algorithms
• How to uniquely identify specific sounds using timing, amplitudes, and frequencies
• Reverse engineering malfunctioning hardware

What's next for CGuard

• Creating a centralized server for data storage and more functionality
• Making the acoustic sensors more reliable by using a dual channel filter
• Assembling all sensors together

Built With

• arduino
• c
• electronic
• sensor