Falcon-Eye

History

This was a personal project I undertook to get initiated in the IOT world as well as Python coding, mobile app development and a few other things ... I also created a fictional background story around it and told it in this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFzSa8oW5WA

Happy for you to reuse what you can. I take no responsabilities for any damages.

Purpose

I created a fictious story so that I have a specific need to solve. This helped me to define more specific behaviours in the code:

• We are in the future. About to colonize Mars.
• Mars environment is volatile and extreme due to thin atmosphere
• This project will monitor the environment variables and act if thresholds are violated (lights, sound alarms, close the door)
• The project will also keep track of vehicles leaving and returning to the base
• There will be three bases (Alfa, Beta, Gamma) in the future. Parts of the code make that asumption

Hardware

Four main hardware components:

• 2 x Photon controllers (by Particle)
  • One with with
    • Sensors (temperature/humidity sensor, light sensor, and override switch)
    • Actuators/outputs (red LED, green LED, yellow LED, a passive buzzer, a servo, a 16x2 LCD with external potentiometer)
  • Another one with
    • Sensors (RFID)
    • Actuators (red LED, green LED, servo)
• Raspberry Pi wireless enabled
• A laptop running windows

Software

From a software component we have

• Sketches for the Photon controllers reading all the sensors and acting on thresholds. They also publish data through MQTT
• MQTT (Message Queuing for Telemetry Transport) for data transfer from controllers to laptop. In particular I run Mosquitto on the Raspberry Pi (mosquitto.org)
• MQTT client running on the laptop listening to two topics (environment and vehicle activity) and creating two log files
• Python code running on the laptop to:
  • create a web page with a map of Mars showing the colour-coded status of each base. This has some Javascript
  • create some other smaller, cleaner files to be used by the mobile app
  • creates a page with historical and another one with the vehicle access log
  • it sends alerts via Twitter (https://twitter.com/MarsAlerts)
• Nginix is the web server I used on my laptop
• Splunk light version is also checking the environment log file and using a dashboard with timelines and basic stats
• A mobile app created with MIT app inventor

Files

I have uploaded the following files:

• Photon sketch for Environment monitoring
• Photon sketch for vehicle tracking
• Python script to process the log file
• Screenshots of the AppInventor

Enjoy !!!

Alberto

Monday 7th December 2015