We are a group of three students from Lane Tech High School in Chicago, Illinois who are working on a class project called the "Lane of Things". The project simulates a project called the "Array of Things," which is a Chicago based project about monitoring and collecting different data from around the city. The goal of the project is to get a better understanding of the different parts of the city and how the diffrent neighborhoods vary on a day to day basis. The different sensors collect everything from temperature to sound to pollution. Our project is a variant of this project, but within our own school. We are looking to collect many diffrent types of data, but for our specific group we will be observing temperature, humidity, motion, and sound. Our sensor will is placed in the main office of our school in an effort to see when the office is at its most crowded and when it is the least crowded. We constructed our sensor enclosure out of wood, cardboard, a plastic bottle top, and lots of hot glue. The wood provided the main enclosure of the box itself with the cardboard and plastic bottle attaching to the sound sensor to create a megaphone effect so that it could gather more noise. The hot glue along with t-slots hold everything together and in place within the enclosure. We used the laser cutters to creates the basic box shape and then used scissors and xacto knifes to shaped everything else until everything fit the way we saw fit. The code was a long process with many problems that had to be fixed. Despite figuring out the code for each of the sensors we encountered a major problem when they didn't sync and work with one another. It took many diffrent attempts and additional help until we were able to figure out a way to get the codes to all work and work with each other. The biggest and one of the only problems we encountered during this project was trying to create a prototype to scale when we didn't have all out sensors. Without all of our sensors we were not able to figure out an accurate idea of how large we needed to make our enclosure so that it fit all of our sensors and wiring. This led to our final enclosure needing to be resized and changed from the original prototype on multiple occasions. The reason we are testing for these things is that every student or faculty always finds themselves passing through the office at least once a week for one reason or another. We want to find when it is the best and worst times to go to the main office as to reduce time waiting in long lines by going to the office during down periods with little to no traffic.
Published April 6, 2017
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