This week’s class period was greatly beneficial in terms of progress for our team! Getting other teams’ opinions and suggestions has opened up our minds more to the potential problems that our team was previously unaware of. We first talked to the Coffee Pour-Over team, whose prototype is coming along very nicely. Their idea is to make the next prototype a little bigger so that a coffee cup or even a coffee pot can fit underneath it, and also print their filters from metal so that hot water can be safely poured over the top. Their project fixes seem to be much simpler than ours, unfortunately. We explained to them that we were having difficulties with our code and wires to connect our three-digit 7-segment display. What happened is that we were following the instructions for a 1 digit 7-segment display (a display that can only show numbers 0-9), but we wanted to use a three-digit display (because most businesses will get more than 9 visitors in a day or at a time). Since the instructions we were following only were for a one-digit display, it wasn’t working properly for our three-digit display. Some of the segments were lighting up, and dots next to the segment were flashing when we used our push button (which we were using in place of the sensors at first, since it was what was used in the instructable). The Coffee Pour-Over team had a good suggestion about storing data- they suggested that we add a way (eventually) to store historical data from the sensor including date and time. In this way, businesses can keep track of and analyze how busy they are on certain days and use data to plan inventory purchases and scheduling; we thought about how a lot of our friends on campus who are bartenders have to be “on-call” and ready to work but we thought this could be reduced or eliminated based on better estimation of busy days and times.

After that, Money Makers came over and Norman changed our world. After trying for a bit to help us get our digits to display better, he suggested that instead we move straight to testing with our PIR sensors- as Chelly pointed out, the push button method (which we couldn’t even get to work properly) could be accomplished with a hand counter used by the person working the door, and thus wasn’t that useful. Norman helped Scott attach our two PIR sensors to our Arduino and helped him find and adjust code that would change to say “motion detected on sensor 1” and “motion detected on sensor 2.” We are much more hopeful that our project can come to life in the way we imagined it, especially if we can capture the historical data. We are going to keep experimenting with it before next week, so hopefully we will have more to report by then.

I was unfortunately not able to capture a picture of the code saying “motion detected” because I didn’t think quickly enough, but I did manage to get pictures of where we were at before Norman’s help, which I have attached as a flickr link.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/organize/?start_tab=new_set