M5 Covid-Bastion

This is my second project related to try to slow the spread of Covid-19 in our world.

As we know, Covid-19 has changed ( if we are lucky) at least our habits, sociality and the way to meet people in common places.

The most of employees (like me) works at home in smartworking, but there are kind of manual (or not) works that can't and they need to access every day to their work spaces.

For this reason we must pay attention to who enters the offices or restricted area spaces in case of suspected fever higher than 37.5 degrees

The main objective of this conceptual project is to demonstrate a way to control access to the offices of employees of a small company or members of an association.

Many companies or associations provide to each employee, member, a personal badge based on an RFID unit to identify it.

Every time the employee logs in when he enters or exits.

So to prevent access to an a identified employee with (hope not!) potential Covid-19 positive state (cause suspected fever above 37.5 degrees) we can use basically two sensor, an RFID sensor to read if the person is enabled to access, and a Not Contact IR Body sensor to verify his human temperature.

Describing the use case, the employee put his RFID badge on the Reader, if his id number is present on the database (to simplify the project in memory) a beep and message asking him to bring the wrist to the temperature sensor then press the Button C to read his temperature

The logical combination of result by the two sensor:

(RFID = Enabled and NCIR <=37.5) --> Gain access to person, (message "Welcome, grant access")

For all the other combination, the access is denied (message "Sorry, no access granted")

The project is mainly based on an Esp32 device so I decide to use M5Stack Core Grey and some other products of the M5 ecosystem, RFID reader and a IR contactless body sensor a built-in infrared sensor MLX90614

I found this devices very easy to integrate like a "Lego" blocks.

To coding I am using UiFlow for some graphics and code in upython with Mu codewith.

Remember, to setup the M5 Stack cores to work, we need to have a MicroPython firmware flashed to our device. The actual Uiflow version used is 1.6.3.

First of all you need to flash your device with the last M5Burner firmware found in the downloads section of the M5Stack website or directly from the UiFlow Settings menu, once open from browser.

Below the sample code i'm using to test the sensor at this first phase, when all works, I can go to phase two and combine sequentially the actions and analyze the result A and B to decide Grant Access or not.

Project is Work in progress so be patient, in the meanwhile stay tuned and above all, maintain social distancing and stay safe from Covid-19!

UPDATE 22/10

Just finalized coding in micropython, soon available on my github. Below a short video with demo how it works!.