Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
71 Power Rack Occupancy System
 Benjamin Wang
Brandon Ramos
Cooper Ge
 Vassily Petrov design_document1.pdf
design_document2.pdf
design_document3.pdf
final_paper1.pdf
proposal2.pdf
proposal1.pdf
# Problem
Power racks are often the most important piece of equipment at a gym for an individual’s work out. Due to the popularity of the equipment, it is pretty rare to find an empty rack at either CRCE or the ARC at most convenient workout times. Busy students who can only go to the gym on a tight time schedule are often met with the frustration of just standing around waiting for a rack to open up with no established method for who gets the next available rack. As it stands, there is no system in place to monitor the occupancy of the power racks, no system for being notified when there are empty power racks, and no way of determining how long someone’s been using a power rack.

# Solution Overview
We propose a grid of sensor systems that rests on the bar holders of the power racks in a gym to detect occupancy of the power rack, how long the exercise has been performed and provides an online interface for viewing this information for all the equipped power racks at the gym. By making this information available to students, our system can provide the following quality of life improvements to the gym-going experience:
- Gauge how many racks are available for use
- Be politely notified of when they are using the power rack for an inordinate amount of time
- Have access to a method of being notified when there are available power racks

We believe that by designing a system that can be installed on any power rack with minimal hardware modification that is connected to a central processing unit with an arbitrary amount of connections, modern gyms would find this as a realistic service to implement.

# Solution Components
Our system will consist of two primary design components and a web design: a processing unit (likely a single board computer or microcontroller) to aggregate the data and act as a data source for the web server, a sensor system to collect data on how the power rack is being used, and a web front end that allows individuals to interact with the data and subscribe to a notification system for empty power racks.



## Processing Unit
This subsystem must be able to collect data from each of sensor-equipped power racks (possibly wirelessly over WiFi), process/organize it, and send it to our web database (likely Google’s Firebase).

## Sensor System
This subsystem must be durable enough to survive on the power rack, able to provide information to the individual using the power rack, able to transmit data to the central processing unit, and detect if the power rack is being used. There we divide the system by the three system specifications.

### Detecting rack occupation
We will be using infrared sensors to detect human movement, an accelerometer to detect bar movement, and pressure sensors for detecting rack-use and weight loads on the rack.

### Human interface system
We’d like to be able to provide visual alerts to the individual using the power rack such as how long they’ve been using the power rack. This will likely utilize an LCD with light indicators to denote time information.

### Transmission system
This system must be able to poll the sensors for detecting rack occupation and send it to the central processing unit. There is a good deal of flexibility in the communication protocol that will be used but WiFi seems most likely.

## Web framework
We would like to provide individuals with the ability to access our data regardless of mobile platform, so we believe a web page is the best choice for users to interface with the system. This web system must allow individuals to view the power rack data for a given gym and allow users to enlist into the notification system. When the system detects an empty rack, all users within the notification system will be notified. Likewise, they are able to remove themselves anytime. The notification system can be implemented with SMS using APIs like Twilio.

# Criterion for success
- Successfully transmit power rack usage data from multiple power racks to be displayed on a web page.
- Implement a working notification system to notify users of empty racks
- Accurately identify when a power rack is in use and how long it has been in use

Wireless IntraNetwork

Daniel Gardner, Jeeth Suresh

Wireless IntraNetwork

Featured Project

There is a drastic lack of networking infrastructure in unstable or remote areas, where businesses don’t think they can reliably recoup the large initial cost of construction. Our goal is to bring the internet to these areas. We will use a network of extremely affordable (<$20, made possible by IoT technology) solar-powered nodes that communicate via Wi-Fi with one another and personal devices, donated through organizations such as OLPC, creating an intranet. Each node covers an area approximately 600-800ft in every direction with 4MB/s access and 16GB of cached data, saving valuable bandwidth. Internal communication applications will be provided, minimizing expensive and slow global internet connections. Several solutions exist, but all have failed due to costs of over $200/node or the lack of networking capability.

To connect to the internet at large, a more powerful “server” may be added. This server hooks into the network like other nodes, but contains a cellular connection to connect to the global internet. Any device on the network will be able to access the web via the server’s connection, effectively spreading the cost of a single cellular data plan (which is too expensive for individuals in rural areas). The server also contains a continually-updated several-terabyte cache of educational data and programs, such as Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg. This data gives students and educators high-speed access to resources. Working in harmony, these two components foster economic growth and education, while significantly reducing the costs of adding future infrastructure.