BusyMap

Sometimes as college students living in the dorm, it is stressful when we need to wait or find study or lounging rooms that are free. We present an app that shows how busy these rooms are.

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Inspiration

As college students living in the dorms, we are very fortunate to have large study and lounge rooms available. However, all of us in the team have been stressed out before trying to find study/lounge rooms during peak hours. Some of us would have to go up and down the floors of our dorm buildings, only to find that all of the study or lounging rooms are taken. Being able to know which rooms were vacant would allow us to save a lot of time.

What it does

Our app, BusyMap, shows how busy the campus study or lounge rooms are. The users are displayed a map with markers at each study lounge location. By using Raspberry Pis placed in each room, we are able to approximate the amount of people occupying it by using Bluetooth Low Energy to count the number of devices in the room. When a location is clicked, we display the approximate amount of people in the room along with the device count.

How we built it

We used a Raspberry Pi laying around and used it's Bluetooth to ping devices around it. It counts how many devices are in a certain radius every minute, then pushes it to a database in the cloud. From there, users can view approximately how many people are in each room through a web app which displays the locations on a map.

Challenges we ran into

Here are some challenges our team members ran into:

The biggest challenge was probably setting up the Bluetooth receiver. There was no easy way to develop on our laptops locally, and the only way to test the Bluetooth was to run and edit the code straight from the Pi. This also made collaborating very hard, but we were able to find a way in the end. -Kyle

A difficult challenge was figuring out the library we were using to track the Bluetooth connections. We needed to figure out a way to only track connections that were within the room we were in. There were no foolproof ways to implement this with the library available, so we settled on filtering out connections based on the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) and approximating how many people would be in a room given the number of connections. -Kevin

A challenge we ran into overall was live sharing code and working together on the same file without running into technical issues often. Another challenge we ran into when working on the front end of the website is getting different aspects of the website to look good and work fine. -Janeth

A difficulty we faced was when figuring out how to get the webapp to look good and be useful to the user at the same time -Viri

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I was proud of how fast we made this product. -Kyle

I’m proud of the accessibility of our project and how we all tried working with something we were unfamiliar with. -Kevin

I was proud of being able to get the entire website to look good in a short amount of time and get it to work efficiently, after thinking it would be quite a difficult task to complete. Another thing I was proud of is being able to get more coding experience. -Janeth

I am proud that we got to work on a challenge that we are personally affected by as we know other students go through the same. -Viri

What we learned

As mostly a software developer, I got the chance to semi-become-a-hardware-developer by using a Raspberry Pi and it’s Bluetooth. -Kyle

I learned about the many tools that improve upon the usual HTML and JavaScript, and learned about the process behind deploying a website for production. -Kevin

I learned the importance of working in a team and collaborating with others to get things done. Lots of the tasks that I had to do I had to ask questions to get more clarifications of how to complete certain things. I also learned how to use different software and languages to make a good website. -Janeth

I learned more about the software aspect as well as learned more about what can be done with the use of Bluetooth -Viri

What's next for BusyMap

Our team would like to explore multifaceted approaches to tracking room vacancy that could improve the accuracy of our app. If this app gets lots of love, hopefully UC Merced will give our team permission--and maybe even the funding--to scale this up to all study, lounge, and even cafeteria rooms on campus! And beyond UC Merced… hopefully people on other (and larger!) campuses can take advantage of this app!

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