Resource-Finder

This project was developed as part of the 2017 Hardware Hackathon: Club Snell Edition hosted by the Northeastern University Wireless and Generate Clubs and was the overall hackathon winner. The Resource-Finder aims to provide a proof of concept for a simple interface to help students find campus resources. The scope of project was to demonstrate the use of a web interface providing two of many possible services that could be incorporated:

1. Printer Tracker
2. Desk Tracker

Printer Tracker

Many students on campus have a difficult time finding printers on campus. The printer tracker module seeks to address this need by plotting all the university printers on a map and showing routes to the nearest three. We use the Google Maps API to show maps, calculate distances, and overlay routes. Further, we provide status inforation to the user including location, ink levels, and max paper count.

In the future, this service can be expanded upon by offering the ability to submit print jobs, report errors, and even incorporate printer load to give users more information as to which printers to use.

Desk Tracker

The seat tracker uses a reflective IR sensor to detemine whether or not a person is sitting at a desk in the library. The sensor was designed to be mounted under desks on the third and fourth floors. We decided to choose desk occupancy rather rather than seats because seats can migrate overtime and are therfore more difficult to pin to absolute locations. The sensors utilize XBee radio modules to send data back to a central host where the online service can be updated.

Presentation

The presentation pitch for the judges panel can be found as a Google Slide here

Installation and Usage

Make sure you have necessary libraries and are running python3:

        pip3 install Flask
	pip3 install beautifulsoup4
	pip3 install requests
	pip3 install lxml

OSX users may need to install additional dependencies for lxml.

• libxml2
• libxslt

If running on Linux/OSX:

        export FLASK_APP=index.py
	python3 -m flask run

If running on Windows:

	set FLASK_APP=index.py
	python3 -m flask run

And go to: [http://127.0.0.1:5000/index.html]