PorchPal

Inspiration

The mass adoption and proliferation of online shopping services like Amazon, has lead to a sharp rise in incidents of doorstep thievery. One of our group member Krishna, was recently a victim of one of these incidents when his vans were stolen. This is what served as the inspiration for the PorchPal.

What it does

The PorchPal is a system that keeps your packages safe from would-be porch pirates. It accomplishes this by using ultrasonic sensors to detect all packages in its range, and then reports directly to the owner if there are any attempts to steal the goods. It also uses an RFID locking system to ensure that the only one who can take the packages is the rightful owner.

How we built it

The project was built primarily with Arduino microcontrollers, as well as the IFTTT cloud platform. There is a main board that connects to all of the different components in the device, and another WI-FI board which interfaces with the web to notify a user if their package is being stolen.

Challenges we ran into

We encountered several challenges during the design process, Unfortunately it was not possible to integrate a camera module into our system as the processing power required to do so was beyond the capability of the Arduino boards that we had available. Additionally, we did not have enough time to fully integrate the notification capability into our system. We had a working example that could connect to our webhook and successfully send the notification to our test user, but we encountered issues when attempting to get the WI-FI board to communicate with the main control board.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The sensor system that we implemented was simple and elegant, we used an pair of ultrasonic sensors to get positional data in an xy-coordinate system, and calibrated the system to only detect packages that were in the given area. The RFID system we built was also very consistent and reliable. Using an RC522 RFID module, we were able to read RFID tags and connect a keycard to disarm the module, as well as prevent non-approved RFID tags from unlocking the device.

What we learned

The idea allowed us to try to use ultrasound sensors to detect an item in an area. This was the first time using these sensors, and researched how to setup and connect the sensors to the Arduino. After getting to know how the sensors work, we were able to utilize two sensors in a perpendicular way which worked great to identify the object in the area. We learned a lot about web requests working when we were setting up the webhook to send users notifications. We had to use IFTTT and make a GET request to an API endpoint to trigger the notification.