Inspiration
Looking at the Themes, we were interested in creating something that would help us in commutes. We knew that weather applications were not very specific to neighborhoods, so we thought it would be fun to look at ways to improve that. We realized that cars are traveling everywhere and have been used in the past for crowdsourcing information like traffic. We thought we could take this a step further with sensors tied to GPS.
What it does
Our sensor collects time, light, and temperature data and pushes it to a CSV file.
How we built it
*Arduino Nano
*Light Sensor
*Temperature Sensor
*Computer
*Phone (GPS as the module we had did not work)
Challenges we ran into
Partway through the challenge, our GPS sensor stopped working. Due to this, we had to change the project and we realized we could use our phones to cover GPS and the collection of that data for now. We found an app created by PhyPhox which we were able to use to save our location data and we then parsed it with the light and temperature data that we collected outside using the time as the primary key.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were able to create a working sensor that tracked data over a long period of time and was able to work all through our drive testing.
What we learned
We learned how to interface with sensors and how to get the file to write data as we drove through the city. We learned a lot of different ways to collect the data especially when our GPS module failed and we were worried about the results of the project.
What's next for Commuter Science
The next step would be to make the entire sensor and the data collection much smaller. We currently used our laptops to store the data but in the future, we think that we can direct the output straight to an sd card to work seamlessly. In the far future, we hope to connect the device to Bluetooth and have an application with the data published from multiple vehicles. This way we can get the information can be updated live for everybody to use at their desire.
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