IPSN Extreme Sensing
With Kyle Buza, and help from Alyssa Wright
The Extreme Sensing contest was held as a part of IEEE IPSN 2007
Challenge
The contest involved having teams build systems that counted the number of people passing through a 10' X 10' area.
Constraints
Teams were to use less than 5 sensors (< 5 Pixels of information).
No wire > 12 inches allowed. Therefore if you used more than one sensor, they had to be wirelessly connected.
Testing
The testing was in two phases.
In the first round, the system would be placed in a high traffic area and other teams will not be allowed to walk through.
In the second round, each team must try to walk through the arena 10 times without being detected by their opponents' sensors, in order to increase their own score while decreasing the scores of their opponents.
Approach
Since we wanted the system to survive the second round, i.e. - not be fooled by others, we decided to not use beam breakers.
Instead, we build a 10' X 10' wooden platform and but 1000 lb load cells on the side. The load cells would register an step function increase/decrease in weight as a person stepped on or off the platform. We then amplified that signal, digitized it (using a AVR Microcontroller) and piped it into the USB port of Mac Mini's. The Mac Mini's sent data to a central computer over Wi-Fi. At this point, we used customized filtering and measurement algorithms we wrote, discussed in the Writeup and the Presentation.
