Hot Car Ally

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Inspiration

There are too many unnecessary because careless parents forget that their child is in a car in extreme temperatures. We wanted to provide a robust solution to prevent these deaths from occurring in the future.

What it does

When a parent walks away from their car with a child in the car seat, their keychain starts buzzing. If the temperature is quite hot, they will be alerted via text message that their child is in danger, in addition, authorities who have access to our monitoring service are notified of the situation and will take action accordingly.

How we built it

We rigged a child car seat with ultrasonic, buttons, radio, GPS, and temperature sensors to detect if a child was in the car seat, what the temperature in the car was, and whether a parent/guardian had left the vehicle. To tell if a parent was in the car or not we had an external "key fob" that was an Arduino with a radio transceiver. The "key fob" communicated with the Arduino in the car seat through radio. If the "key fob" lost communication with the Arduino in the car seat, the "key fob" would start buzzing and the car seat would output temperature, latitude, and longitude, and its Car Seat ID, to a serial terminal on the raspberry pi. The raspberry pi then parsed that data into a format readable by the Web Controller. The Web Controller was built with .Net core. The monitoring system was built with Angular to display Panic Events.

Challenges we ran into

The connection between the raspberry pi and the web controller, the GPS module wouldn't connect in the building, temperature sensor needed a lot of work to get the correct values, and the load sensor did not work so we used a workaround by utilizing buttons