Stay Away Thieves

Inspiration

As university students who live in dorm rooms, we have communal fridges. However, from personal experience, we have witnessed many incidents of food theft in these kitchens. We were inspired to solve a problem that affects us and our friends.

What it does

Our project is a theft prevention food container that take a photo of the culprit and sends an email notification to the owner, exposing the thief. The email body includes an attachment of the picture of the thief in order to allow the user to identity the culprit and potentially choose to share the image on social media.

How I built it

We used a raspberry pi zero with a tilt sensor (to detect if the container lid has been opened) and a webcam attached to it. When the tilt sensor detects that the lid has been opened, it prompts the camera to take a picture and store it on the pi. The pi then emails the picture to the user's phone.

Challenges I ran into

We had a problem finding adequate hardware components that we can use in order to accomplish our task. This was difficult because we did not originally have access to a raspberry pi and we were trying to find workarounds to use the webcam on an arduino Galileo or uno. However, it was not possible because the Galileo was discontinued and therefore some of the files we needed were no longer publicly provided by intel, and we didn't have wireless communication models for the uno.

As for the software, the hardest challenge involved sending a notification and a picture attachment from the raspberry pi to the users phone. None of us were familiar with how to approach the problem as we had little experience with the raspberry pi and we were confused on whether we had to make a unique app for the phone to receive files. This also required us to host domains and servers - which our team had little experience in.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We did not give up despite the setbacks caused by the limited hardware options.

We figured out coding and hardware concepts regarding IoT that we were previously unfamiliar with.

We managed to find a very elegant solution to our software once we had a Raspberry Pi by using Python to send an email with an image attachment - this sends a notification and a picture without the need of developing an app.

What I learned

We learned how to use raspberry pi and learned a lot of programming concepts and became more familiar with python

What's next for Stay Away Thieves

We would like to implement a gyro and GPS sensor to replace our tilt sensor in order to make it work more optimally

Built With

• bash
• email
• os
• os.path
• python
• raspberry-pi
• smtplib
• webcam