Final Demo

Description

The Final Demonstration (Final Demo) is the single, most important assignment in the course. It is the strongest measure of the success of your project. The evaluation focuses on the criteria of project completion, reliability, and professionalism. You will demo your full project to a group consisting of your Professor, your TA, and a few peer reviewers. Other guests (e.g. alumni, other course staff, visiting scholars, donors) may sometimes also be present.

Requirements and Grading

Students must be able to demonstrate the full functionality of their project to the instructors. If full functionality is not available, then students must be able to show the parts of the project that do function via the procedure listed in their Requirements and Verification Table. Credit will not be given for features which cannot be demonstrated, even if those features worked before and suddenly fail at the time of the final demo. Still, for any portion of the project which does not function as specified, students should have hypotheses and supporting evidence for what the problem may be.

The project team should be ready to justify design decisions and technical aspects of any part of the project (not just your own parts). Quantitative results are expected wherever applicable.

Grading is covered by the Demo Rubric, and is out of 150 points. Some of the key points are as follows:

  1. Completion: The project has been entirely completed.
  2. Thoroughness: Care and attention to detail are evident in construction and layout.
  3. Performance: Performance is completely verified, and operation is reliable.
  4. Understanding: Everyone on the project team must be able to demonstrate understanding of his/her technical work and show that all members have contributed significantly.

Submission and Deadlines

Sign-up for a demo time is handled through the PACE system. Again, remember to sign up for a peer review session as well.

BusPlan

Featured Project

# People

Scott Liu - sliu125

Connor Lake - crlake2

Aashish Kapur - askapur2

# Problem

Buses are scheduled inefficiently. Traditionally buses are scheduled in 10-30 minute intervals with no regard the the actual load of people at any given stop at a given time. This results in some buses being packed, and others empty.

# Solution Overview

Introducing the _BusPlan_: A network of smart detectors that actively survey the amount of people waiting at a bus stop to determine the ideal amount of buses at any given time and location.

To technically achieve this, the device will use a wifi chip to listen for probe requests from nearby wifi-devices (we assume to be closely correlated with the number of people). It will use a radio chip to mesh network with other nearby devices at other bus stops. For power the device will use a solar cell and Li-Ion battery.

With the existing mesh network, we also are considering hosting wifi at each deployed location. This might include media, advertisements, localized wifi (restricted to bus stops), weather forecasts, and much more.

# Solution Components

## Wifi Chip

- esp8266 to wake periodically and listen for wifi probe requests.

## Radio chip

- NRF24L01 chip to connect to nearby devices and send/receive data.

## Microcontroller

- Microcontroller (Atmel atmega328) to control the RF chip and the wifi chip. It also manages the caching and sending of data. After further research we may not need this microcontroller. We will attempt to use just the ens86606 chip and if we cannot successfully use the SPI interface, we will use the atmega as a middleman.

## Power Subsystem

- Solar panel that will convert solar power to electrical power

- Power regulator chip in charge of taking the power from the solar panel and charging a small battery with it

- Small Li-Ion battery to act as a buffer for shady moments and rainy days

## Software and Server

- Backend api to receive and store data in mongodb or mysql database

- Data visualization frontend

- Machine learning predictions (using LSTM model)

# Criteria for Success

- Successfully collect an accurate measurement of number of people at bus stops

- Use data to determine optimized bus deployment schedules.

- Use data to provide useful visualizations.

# Ethics and Safety

It is important to take into consideration the privacy aspect of users when collecting unique device tokens. We will make sure to follow the existing ethics guidelines established by IEEE and ACM.

There are several potential issues that might arise under very specific conditions: High temperature and harsh environment factors may make the Li-Ion batteries explode. Rainy or moist environments may lead to short-circuiting of the device.

We plan to address all these issues upon our project proposal.

# Competitors

https://www.accuware.com/products/locate-wifi-devices/

Accuware currently has a device that helps locate wifi devices. However our devices will be tailored for bus stops and the data will be formatted in a the most productive ways from the perspective of bus companies.