SuperSensor 2000

Inspiration

Why would we need so many sensors? One of the most important things about natural habitats is their ability to maintain homeostasis. This is also one of the most fascinating parts about the natural world. Without this constant interaction climates, environments, and even biological systems would fail. Consider ecology for example. If the population of predators increases beyond a critical threshold, then the number of prey will decrease significantly. With less food, the predators will soon die out, readjusting the population levels back to a stable equilibrium. With this idea in mind, we recognized that a multisensor device could be utilized for several critical applications from agriculture, to space travel, and healthcare by allowing the user to maintain their own equilibrium with a high level of control.

What it does

This process of maintenance requires a constant feedback loop within the environment. With our sensor, we would mimic this idea of a feedback loop. Qualities of the environment (ex. air temperature, air pressure, humidity, etc.) are constantly assessed. If there is some deviance from the ideal values (which were generated through agricultural journal studies), an alert is created on the webpage, informing those who run the ecosystem immediately! Then, those individuals would be able to fix the error in the ecosystem and return the environment to its equilibrium.

Challenges

A few challenges we ran into included having to learn how to use the different hardware and implementing our data into our website. This hardware was a unfamiliar to us so had to learn how to incorporate it into our project. We lacked web designing experience so having to use multiple languages was a challenge, along with learning javascript. We attempted to use Twilio but ran into countless issues from account issues to software issues. We decided to scrap the idea of sending notifications to the user's phone due to the amount of time it would require to set that up.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of how the styling of the website and the independent parts that we created. But more than anything, this has been such an educational experience. 2/3 of our team had never been to a hackathon before, nor have we had any formal programming experience outside of the classroom. Prior to this project, we had never been able to combine mutliple different languages to form one project before. However, the SuperSensor required multiple parts and coding languages to interact in a way that we had never accomplished previously.

What we learned

We learned how to create a dynamic website capable of updating its values as new data is acquired. Along with, learning javascript and how to incorporate that with html and with our data coming from an external device.

What's next for SuperSensor 2000

Next, we would like our sensor to extend beyond simply sensing. As we mentioned previously the goal of this project is to be able to contribute to homeostasis. Therefore, the next logical step is to have our hack actually respond to the qualities that it is sensing. This mimics the structure of a negative feedback look. For instance, if the SuperSensor detects that the temperature in an environment is too low, it would be connected to a heating unit that would warm the surrounding air until it reached a stable level. At this point, the SuperSensor would no longer register a deviance from the proper values, and would therefore stop heating the room.