The Brief

The brief was to create a system to enable a site manager to give an emergency responder an accurate account of which rooms are clear of people and which rooms have people trapped in them. the responder can then concentrate on these rooms and have a greater degree of success in rescuing people before injuries or damage to health can occur.

The Solution

As a group we came up with a system that is mounted to each door frame. Using either lasers, a camara or both the system would be able to process the movement of people in either direction through the door. The data is sent to an online database that can be accessed by the emergency services/site manager in emergencies. The camera and lasers are run by a raspberry pi, one for each door. The camera works via Computer Vision software that counts people entering and exiting a room based on contours whilst moving through the door, Whilst the lasers send signals to be interpreted by a finite state machine coded into the pi.

My Contribution

My role in the group was to design and build the online database for the system. This required deciding on the software to use and making sure that the pi was able to interact with it. Eventually i decided to use a MySQL solution. Events were used to process the data send by each individual door. This in turn was used to create a table that could output the data in a nice (presentable) format. In order to increase reliability there was also a reset which would occur setting the system back to 0 every day. There were also systems in place to make sure that if a room was to go negative the system would be able to autocorrect itself and readjust to add a person if necessary in the correct location.