This week, we finally set out on our final project. We have decided on a people counter, to be used at bars, restaurants, shelters, and other similar establishments. The video on prototyping the mouse has given me some insight on just how long it might take to get the perfect iteration of our project if we were to continue to try to perfect it, as did the design as an iterative process video. It makes sense that it would take a long time to get the final version, but it would definitely take some perseverance and patience. I found the tip about prototyping using everyday articles (such as the Pringles can) in the ProtoTYPING article.

We were initially going to make our project with laser pointers on one side of the door frame and sensors to “catch” the lasers on the other side of the door frame. Brandon, from the Fab Lab, however, suggested that we instead use Passive Infrared Sensors, which only require sensors on one side of the frame. These Passive Infrared Sensors sense motion and, through code stored in the Arduino we will be using, will tick up or down a person, depending on if the movement of the person is “in” or “out.” We will have a number ticker displayed on our final product so that it is visible to users the number of people in their restaurant, bar, shelter, etc. If we were to go into more and more iterations, however, we were thinking that this might not be the best way to display the number of people. Instead of having it simply be visible to the users, it would be very beneficial if there were a way to keep all of the data on exactly how many people are there and at what times, on what days of the week, etc. This would be useful because these places would be better able to track traffic and base their inventory decisions on this data. Our model, however, will be mostly used for real-time counting to know when they are nearing capacity. Here are some photos of the PIR sensor and our Arduino

Our speaker in class this week was from Shapeways. I found her talk very interesting, as I had previously had known nothing about Shapeways. I found it surprising that their customers are about equally split between people who need just one or two models of something (likely a prototype) and people who order a few hundred or more of their items.