Inspiration
In college, there have been many times when people have asked us to quiet down because they want to study, or we have to leave because others are too loud (and these can happen in the same location). We want a solution that helps us decide where to go to study or socialize, before we even get there. In other words, if we want to study, we should be sent somewhere where most people are studying, but if we want to socialize, we should be sent where most people are socializing
What it does
This app keeps track of ambient noise, light, and temperature in various locations around Rutgers campus (essentially anywhere people generally like to hang out to study or just chill). With this data, it determines how many people are in an area and how loud they are. Users can then access this data from our website, so they can see exactly where they need to go if they want quiet to study or liveliness to socialize. This way, people don't need to worry about quieting others or hunting for different spots to study.
How we built it
We built this by using an arduino to collect sensor data from a sounds sensor, light sensor, and temperature sensor. We would ideally post to a server straight from there, but since we don't have networking capabilities on this Arduino, we connected it via serial to our computer, which then uses a small python script to post to the server. Then, our website gets data from the server based on which location was requested, informing the user how loud/hot/bright the room is and whether or not it is a good place to be to study or socialize.
Challenges we ran into
Our biggest challenge was the hardware available to us, because we didn't have anything that connected to the internet easily (we couldn't get our hands on a Pi and the Intel Edison simply would not work with the wifi). We had to settle for a serial connection to an internet-connected computer. We also ran into challenges trying to display the various location options, but we used the Google Maps API to show that nicely.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of our Google Maps viewer, which zooms and scales and responds to mouse clicks very easily and effectively. We are also proud of the fact that we worked around our physical limitations to finally get a board that we could connect to the internet.
What we learned
We learned about using hardware with Arduinos and connecting them to servers. We also learned about web development, mostly on the javascript end. Finally, we learned how annoying it can be to install certain things.
What's next for Where2Hang
Where2Hang is easily scalable, and the obvious next choice would be to cover more ground on the Rutgers Campus, literally. We also want to store more information over time, to provide data on which to find patterns and perform analytics to better determine whether it would be a good idea to hang out in a certain location.
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