Senior Design - The Occupancy Project

Hardware + Software + Entrepreneurship = ?? 

Over the past two semesters, I've been working with some amazing people to develop our senior design project.  Ever wanted to find an empty room to meet? The Occupancy Report is here to help! - That was the vision guiding us as we built our device and platform prototypes.

Are you a visual person? Check out our poster instead.

The First Entrepreneurial Project - Ever

For the first time ever, the faculty running the senior design program allowed student teams to come up with their own entrepreneurial idea. After some brainstorming, we arrived at our idea, but that was just the beginning. We had to write a proposal as all other companies had done, get it reviewed, and finally approved. Once the paperwork had been filed, we were off.

Identifying the Problem

Every finals week, students have trouble finding places to get together to study exam materials and finish group assignments. Not only that, throughout the year, school administrators try to make informed decisions about room and power usage for on-campus buildings.

We focused on developing a solution to assist both students and school administrators with some intuitive software and hardware innovations.

Our Solution

Rooms around the university will report their current  occupancy status via our occupancy sensor add-on to a user-friendly web application. With this new room occupancy information,  students can make informed choices about where to study and meet, and the university can make informed  decisions using our application’s analytics about classroom usage, room popularity, energy consumption, etc.

Because of Iowa State’s continued growth in enrollment, managing classroom usage effectively is more important than ever.  The Occupancy Project will help Iowa State get the most out of their current buildings and be at the forefront of smart and sustainable technologies.

Design Approach

We initially brainstormed a solar-powered occupancy sensor add-on attached to the exterior of a sensor transmitting over Wi-Fi to our software system.

Below is our first try:

We evaluated software and hardware components for cost, ease of integration, longevity, and electrical and spatial requirements.

As we built out our application, several initial ideas had to change before we decided on our final Hardware Implementation below

Hardware Implementation

Our final hardware design involves the device integrating directly with an existing occupancy sensor.

We use the voltage that powers one of the debugging LED lights to signal our microcontroller that motion has been detected.

Once our servers receive this, we log and visualize the data accordingly.

Software Implementation

I know it's kinda hard to read.. Sorry about that!

How It Works

Our ESP8266 microcontroller takes advantage of the Arduino library which allowed us to more easily program and configure the device. Using a REST API, we are able to communicate with a NoSQL backend service called Parse. After compiling this data in the backend, we use JavaScript to pull the data and display it on our website. Using HTML and CSS, we are able to display the data in list and graph formats, allowing the users to easily visualize which classrooms are available as well as review historical analytics data. To help populate our database, we created web scrapers to get classroom data from Iowa State websites.

Technical Details

Programming Languages

• C – used for our embedded systems code
• JavaScript – used to interact with Parse Database
• HTML/CSS – used to visually structure our web application

Libraries

• Arduino – Allowed us to develop hardware component
• Parse – Hosted NoSQL database and sever logic
• jQuery – Reduced time needed to make site interactive
• HighCharts – Used to create visually appealing graphs

Development Tools

• Arduino IDE to assist writing embedded systems code
• Atom, Brackets, and Sublime were our favorite text editors for coding

Hardware

• ESP8266 is a wifi enabled microcontroller with wi-fi capabilities. It's super affordable and fun to build with. Check it out here.

And that pretty much wraps up our project, if you didn't already, check out our poster for some more visuals and details.

Have questions or ideas? Message me! Or email me at [email protected]