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  Open movable Subway Doors

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  Closed movable Subway Doors

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  Photogate Circuit testings

Car36

Hallie Gordon, Leah Baron, Hudi Weiss, Noa Strupinsky

Inspiration:

Our inspiration for this project stems from the daily stresses that accompany travel. The NYTimes describes that the biggest problem with NYC subways isn't broken trains, it's overcrowding. Crowding leads to increased "dwell time" for subways, which means that you are spending more time on the subway.

"The percentage of delayed trains rose to about 37 percent"

"120-180 people fit into one car"

" 5.7 million riders per weekday"

By directing and advising people where to go the travel experience can be faster and more enjoyable!

NYTimes: SubWay Hell

What it does:

In our prototype of Car36 we employed six photogates-a physical gate using lasers and photoresistors in order to detect movement in a cheap way- three in the front and three right behind. This system allows us to keep track of how many people enter and exit the train car, and advise accordingly. The photogates will be verticle to count how many people enter and exit.

How we built it:

We built Car36 using a number of different platforms. The physical subway we built using cardboard, tape, hot glue, and our own creativity to model an NYC subway. We also soldered 6 photogates and lasers to mount onto the doors of the subway. We coded the algorithm using Arduino and connected to Wifi using a NODEMCU (wifi shield). The website was coded using HTML and CSS that was inserted into the Arduino Code with special markers.

Challenges we ran into:

As usual, we ran into many challenges. As the youngest coders in the room we do not have as much experience using more sophisticated software and connecting to Wifi, so we had to learn how to connect Arduino, the chip that we used for our code, to the internet. We tried many things, such as Blynk, ESP8266, Sparkfun Esp8266 Thing dev, and USB-serial.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

We are very proud of our Subway Prototype and that we are the youngest coders in the room. The amount of work that we have done is amazing, and that we were able to include hardware and a website into our project.

What we learned:

We learned many things from this Hack-it-together. We learned that timing and meeting are very important, as well as being on the same page. Languages such as "Markdown," HTML, and CSS are new to us and we had to experiment with the syntax.

What's next for Car36:

In the future we would love to integrate our counter onto general MTA apps so that commuters can make decisions accordingly. We would love to have everything up and running on the website and have a better and more sophisticated model of the subway.

Built With

• arduino
• css
• hardware
• htlml
• html
• libraries
• nodemcu
• photogates