Problem
With quarantine, I have not been leaving the house all that much, so I seem to have lost my intuition about temperature and my habit of always checking the weather in the morning. This has led me to be surprised by how hot/cold it gets if I’ve gone on a long walk or gone grocery shopping as well as when it starts raining before I’ve gotten home. This led me to the idea of a system that when I leave the house, would let me know about weather changes in the 2 following hours without bothering me. During initial discussion, Jet brought up the suggestion of having reminders only if the person isn’t prepared for the weather change as well as a notification if the person forgot a mask.
Solution
To realize my idea, I plan to make a system that would notify you depending on the weather change when you are leaving the house. It would be known if you are leaving the house rather than entering house because the motion sensor would not be triggered. When you open the door, the current weather would be compared to the weather in the next 2 hours and if it will rain, snow, and/or the temperature will change by 5°F or more you’ll be notified. This data would be collected by a python web scraper. For rain or snow, a pitter-patter type sound would be played by the speaker and temperature changes would be signified by the LED strip’s colors. To attract the person’s attention, this would flash the appropriate color of red-orange or blue three times before staying on for about 5 seconds more. These reminders would be noticeable but not a bother if you are already prepared. This is what I want to first accomplish and then will move on to implementing the RFID part as this is most important to me and it is easily usable by everyone and tags would not have to be put on clothes. Additionally, this would be my first time using WiFi on a project, connecting the Arduino to Python, and creating a web scraper, so I want to focus first on doing that well.
To create the system that would only notify the person if they aren’t prepared, I’d put an RFID scanner near the door frame beside the magnetic door switch so that the the tags on clothes could be scanned while you walk by. The same barcodes would be on things that fit the same purpose. For example, all masks would have one code, rain jacket and umbrella would have another, sweatshirts another, and light jackets another. This can be customized per user in the household code so that what they’d wear for certain conditions and the matching codes are associated with just that person. Each person would be differentiated by the RFID card that they carry on them whenever they leave the house, here the CMU ID card. For a full product using this, I’ve found laundry safe RFID tags that were pretty cheap and small so could work really well in this application.
Components I plan to use:
- magnetic door switch
- esp8266 module or board
- speaker
- led strip
- motion sensor
Add ons
- RFID sensor and cards
