April 2013 – Vlad Petrescu

This week-end I took part in the Raspberry Pi Hackathon. Except the fact that I needed 15 hours of sleep in order to recover from the time spent building the project, it was a wonderful experience both for beginners and the advanced ones in this field. I, my dad and two students from Electrical and Electronic Engineering department from Polytechnic University of Bucharest made an effective team and took part in the hardware section.

Purpose of the project: remote monitoring of a room or area where access is difficult or dangerous

Examples of use :

1) residential

monitoring parameters of comfort or safety through a web interface (it can be accessed also on the smart phone);
regular use of sensors (temperature, humidity, pressure, wind, proximity, etc.);
comfort control parameters by pressing a button ( floor heating, water pumps, sockets/lights, etc.);
using a webcam with motion detection which sends pictures on a predefined email address.

2) professional use

centralizing the aggregation parameters from distributed sensors (eg scattered mini weather stations)
collecting data from mobile stations (video/audio, collections of various sensors) using a platform with wheels (line follower) controlled by Arduino which communicate with raspberry pi pyfirmata
streaming video/audio

Project components:

Raspberry Pi sensor I2C or SPI
Usb webcam
Usb wi-fi (for communication with the mobile platform)
Arduino Mega controller for 4 motors drivers and additional analog and digital sensors (IR, ultrasound)
Arduino Uno controller for relays which control the sockets and lights