Metis

In Greek Mythology Metis is a goddess of the Titan generation and was an oracle and considered the embodiment of wise consul. In 2016 Metis (a work in progress) is a physical site monitoring tool to help capture, catalog, and analyse the vehicular traffic entering and leaving a site.

Physical security is a bid deal these days and lots of places need some amount of monitoring. Maybe it is a day care or school where the need to be vigilant as to whom is coming or going and what their intentions are is ever present. Maybe it is a construction site with costly materials, equipment, and tools. It could be a ranch where the access road is very long and blocked from view at the main house. Or it could be something sensitive such as an electrical substation. Regardless, a need exists to be able to detect the presence of a vehicle and capture that information. That is the job of Metis. To be your oracle and wise counsel with respect to the physical security of your site.

Design Goals

The design goal of the Metis project are fairly straightforward:

• Battery Powered with solar charging for remote installation.

• AC or DC powered for permanent installation where available.

• Presence detection with one or more sensors.

• Image capture of the target.

• Basic image processing and target detection to prevent multiple captures of the same target.

• Time of day, Day of week, Week of Month, and Month of Year scheduling.

• Cellular data connectivity.

• Cloud-based data collection and analysis.

• Web-based front end for data review and reporting.

System Architecture

* This is currently a proposed architecture and may change before final release.

Primary processing power for Metis will be provided by a Raspberry Pi. The Pi is more than capable of driving the project and with its easy integrations to the cloud and camera, it makes an ideal platform for the Metis system.

The Raspberry Pi, however, lacks data connectivity especially in remote locations. This is where the AT&T IoT kit into play. Offering a simple interface and cellular data via the AT&T network (in the USA) the kit provides the link to get the data and images out of the Raspberry Pi and into the cloud back end.

Data from the Pi will be uploaded to the PubNub IoT hub for further processing. Events sent to PubNub will be collated and analyzed to provide some out-of-the box reporting such as number of targets per day, week, or month. PubNub will also receive alerts generated by the Metis system and dispatch those to parties registered on the platform to receive alerts. (This could be a time-of-day based alarm for example.)

Finally, the primary user interface for reporting, inspection of the data, and configuration of the system will be hosted on an Azure web site.