2023–24 Projects:
Advisor: Amy Csizmar Dalal
Sensor networks are wireless networks comprised of small, specialized radio-transmitting hardware that collect data and send it to a central controller for analysis. Sensor networks are used in many different types of applications in many different domains. Environmentalists and climatologists use them to collect temperature and other weather-related data to determine ecosystem changes over time, detect the erosion of glaciers, etc. Geophysicists, as we learned from Tracy Camp's talk last week, use them to record seismic data to detect avalanches. "Smart homes" use them to control the lights and thermostat. Health care workers use them to monitor patients both inside hospitals and at home. The possibilities are endless!
A potential application of sensor networks is to determine the usage patterns of a building---say, the CMC. There are many different ways we can detect approximately how many people are in a space at a given time. We could use camera data, processing the resulting images to determine or approximate the number of people in the image. We could also use other types of data, such as motion sensing (increment a counter each time motion is detected in a particular area) or temperature (the more bodies in a room, the higher the ambient temperature).
Understanding the usage patterns of a building is important, because it can help organizations allocate personnel and resources (including energy usage) better. As an example, Mike Tie is interested in how many people use the computer labs on a daily/weekly/monthly basis, as well as what the peak times are for lab usage and how often the labs are filled to capacity. Having this information would help Mike figure out how many lab assistants to hire, when the lab assistants should be deployed in the lab, and whether we need to request additional lab space to accomodate our majors and our classes. Similarly, Martha Larson, Carleton's Manager of Campus Energy and Sustainability, might be interested in CMC lab usage as a way to determine if Carleton could improve energy usage in the computer labs.
In this project, you will build and deploy a sensor network within the CMC. This network will collect data about the usage patterns of the CMC using motion detection sensors, which we will then analyze. The goal of this project is mostly to build and deploy a sensor network, and then ideally to do something interesting with the resulting data that the network generates.
The project will entail the following activities:
This is a very hands-on project. There are a lot of unique, interesting, and fun challenges inherent to this project. You'll spend a lot of time troubleshooting hardware. Sensors will fail. There will be power failures. There might be interference from other networks. The data will sometimes be messy or otherwise sub-par. You'll have to come up with creative solutions and workarounds to these issues. The project timeline is designed to accommodate these challenges, and in fact this is part of the fun of this project---it will stress your brain differently from your typical Comps project. If you like tinkering or building things, or have always wanted to tinker or build things, this project is for you!
By the end of this project, you will have a working sensor network deployed within the CMC, comprised of a number of motion detecting sensors and a controller that collects the data. This is the baseline deliverable for this project.
Once this is complete, you will provide an analysis (possibly preliminary, depending on how well deployment goes) of some subset of the motion detection data collected from the sensor network. At a minimum, the analysis should count approximately the number of users entering and/or leaving a space within the CMC within a certain time frame.
If these two deliverables are accomplished, the "stretch goal" is to refine the analysis to deduce time-of-day patterns in CMC usage (based on "person counts").
The minimum experience for this project is Computer Organization and Architecture (if you're enrolled in the fall, that's sufficient). It's useful if you've taken (or are enrolled in) Computer Networks or Digital Electronics, but these are not deal-breakers. It's more important for this project for you to have an adventurous spirit and a willingness to persevere in the face of setbacks!