MEGR3171Team10:

Carlos Butz Monroy

•

Carson Ramm

•

Alex Crotts

Published December 5, 2020 © GPL3+

Counting Customers

This project will help your business keep track of max capacity during this pandemic!

BeginnerFull instructions provided2 hours365

Things used in this project

Hardware components

PIR Sensor, 7 m

Particle Argon

Software apps and online services

Particle Build Web IDE

IFTTT Maker service

Google Sheets

Story

Living in the year 2020 has been interesting. This pandemic has brought to our attention the importance of maintaining public health as individuals, communities, and businesses. One of the best ways to do that is to limit exposure to others in ways such as social distancing. It's tough to accomplish that inside of a packed building so nearly all public buildings and gathering areas have a capacity limit, but how can this be regulated without having someone stand at the door and count every person who enters the building and subtract every person who exits? Sounds like too much mental math for us. We wanted to design a system that could keep a count of the number of people entering the building and exiting and subtract them in order to keep a real-time total of the number inside.

Our goal was for this to be linked to a spreadsheet with constantly updating cells and graphs. With this data, you could also determine what times throughout the day are the busiest and which days of the week receive the most traffic. Businesses could use this information on their websites so that consumers could have access to it and make decisions based on the data. For example, if you needed to go to your local grocery store sometime this week but wanted to avoid the crowds, you could check a website to see the trends in this data to choose the least busy time to get your frozen pizzas.

Particle Argon Circuit Connections

The connections for the circuits were pretty simple. Two PIR motion sensors were used with each being on the lowest sensitivity and range settings. Each was connected directly to a Particle Argon in a breadboard from the power, signal, and ground pins. The third Argon was a receiver and had no circuit connections.

Physical Setup

A convenient location for us to test this system was a Starbucks where one of our group members works. One Argon with the PIR motion sensor was set up near the entrance to the building and the other was set up at the end of the counter where customers were leaving. Naturally, the former Argon was the "entrance Argon" and the latter was the "exit Argon".

Entrance Argon

Exit Argon

Both Argons contained code to detect motion signals from the PIR sensor and change a variable called "counter" by publishing an event to the Particle cloud. The difference between the two sets of code is how they affected the numerical counter when they detect motion. The "entrance Argon" adds 1 to the counter while the "exit Argon" subtracts one. This counter variable was stored by a third Argon which subscribed to the events of both publishing Argons. When the subscribing Argon received event data, the D7 LED on the board was set to come on as an indicator.

IFTTT Application

The services available through the application If This Then That (IFTTT) allowed us to track the motion activation as well as the numerical counter in Google Sheets. An IFTTT applet was created to read event data from the subscribing Argon. This applet stored specific event data in the sheet and also sent a smartphone notification to one of the group members that new data was published. This was an optional addition that we wanted to provide an extra bit of certainty that the event data was coming across properly.

IFTTT Notification

The Google Sheet updates automatically when new event data is published and recorded in the corresponding cells. It is formatted as a line graph of the counter versus the date and time of motion detection.

Google Sheet for Recording Event Data

Possible Future Advancement

There are a lot of possibilities for this project going forward. Now that we have the basic idea and setup, we could implement other sensors or displays to make a more useful tool. If we continue advancing this project, we would like to implement an LCD module that will display a message once a certain number is reached by the counter. This could be a user input for a building's maximum allowed capacity. Perhaps a video option could be added with facial detection for accurately counting groups of people passing the sensor at the same time. This project can lay the groundwork for these ideas and other advancement options.

Project Video

Video Presentation of the Project

Code

int counter= 0;
int passerbydetected = 0;  //global variable
int ledPin = D7;


void setup() {
    pinMode(D7,OUTPUT);
    pinMode(D6,INPUT);// Configure D6 as INPUT for PIR Sensor
    Particle.subscribe("MEGR3171F20/team10/countingoneperson", Igotthesignal);
}

void loop() {

passerbydetected = digitalRead(D6);
if(passerbydetected == TRUE){
    counter = counter+1;
    Particle.publish("MEGR3171F20/team10/someonejustwalkedby","MotionDetected",PUBLIC);
    //subscribe to this motion event
    delay(5000);
}
}


void Igotthesignal(const char *event, const char *data) {
    digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH);
    delay(5000);
    digitalWrite(ledPin,LOW);
    
}

int counter= 0;
int passerbydetected = 0;  //global variable
int ledPin = D7;


void setup() {
    pinMode(D7,OUTPUT);
    pinMode(D6,INPUT);// D6 for PIR sensor as INPUT
    Particle.subscribe("MEGR3171F20/team10/countingoneperson", Igotthesignal);
}

void loop() {

passerbydetected = digitalRead(D6);
if(passerbydetected == TRUE){
    counter = counter+1;
    Particle.publish("MEGR3171F20/team10/someonejustwalkedout","MotionDetected",PUBLIC);
    //subscribe to this motion event
    delay(5000);
}
}


void Igotthesignal(const char *event, const char *data) {
    digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH);
    delay(5000);
    digitalWrite(ledPin,LOW);
    
}

int i;
int ledPin = D7; // choose the pin for the LED
int inputPin = D6; // choose the input pin (for PIR sensor)
int pirState = LOW; // we start, assuming no motion detected
int val = 0; // variable for reading the pin status
int counter = 0;

void setup() {
    Particle.subscribe("MEGR3171F20/team10/someonejustwalkedby",someonejustwalkedby); 
    Particle.subscribe("MEGR3171F20/team10/someonejustwalkedout",someonejustwalkedout); 
    Serial.begin(9600);  //Turns on the particle serial port
pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);
digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH);  //blink on reset
delay(5000);
digitalWrite(ledPin,LOW);

}
void loop() {
    //Nothing loops for now 
    
}

void someonejustwalkedby(const char *event, const char *data) {  //do this when the motion event is published.

    digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH); //make the LED turn on if the event occurs.
    delay(5000);
    digitalWrite(ledPin,LOW);
     counter= counter +1;
        Particle.publish("MEGR3171F20/team10/countingoneperson", String(counter), PUBLIC);
}
       
void someonejustwalkedout(const char *event, const char *data) {  //do this when the motion event is published.

    digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH); //make the LED turn on if the event occurs.
    delay(5000);
    digitalWrite(ledPin,LOW);
     counter= counter -1;
        Particle.publish("MEGR3171F20/team10/countingoneperson", String(counter), PUBLIC);
    
}

Credits

Carlos Butz Monroy

1 project • 1 follower

Mechanical Engineer Major

Contact

Carson Ramm

1 project • 3 followers

Contact

Counting Customers

Things used in this project

Hardware components

Software apps and online services

Story

Particle Argon Circuit Connections

Physical Setup

IFTTT Application

Possible Future Advancement

Project Video

Schematics

Argon Circuit Schematic

Code

IOTPUBLISHENTER

IOTPUBLISHEXIT

IOTSubscriber

Credits

Carlos Butz Monroy

Carson Ramm

Alex Crotts

Comments

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Counting Customers

Counting Customers

Things used in this project

Hardware components

Software apps and online services

Story

Particle Argon Circuit Connections

Physical Setup

IFTTT Application

Possible Future Advancement

Project Video

Schematics

Argon Circuit Schematic

Code

IOTPUBLISHENTER

IOTPUBLISHEXIT

IOTSubscriber

Credits

Carlos Butz Monroy

Carson Ramm

Alex Crotts

Comments

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