Home Intercom

You Rang? (Lurge, Addams Family)
Sometimes it's really difficult to locate other family members or to get people to come when dinner is ready. A home intercom on each room use to be the coolest. However, wiring each room is a huge en-devour. A wireless solution attach to each person/pet would be ideal to get access to everyone.
OpenThread is an open source project started by Nest to communicate with IoT devices. The communication protocol is based on an IPv6 addressing schema. The technology supports UDP sockets, CoAp client and server (supported by the NXP Rapid IoT Kit), DHCPv6 client and server, DNSv6 client, NCP support, border router, etc.
The Thread network is composed of routers and end devices. These can be configure to be commissioners and joiners. The commissioners have the ability to allow the join of new devices into the network. There is also the OTBR (OpenThread Border Router) which allows to a WiFi access point and a network bridge with an Ethernet connector to gain access to the internet.
Creating a network of Thread devices requires more than one supported device. We only had an NXP Rapid IoT kit, so we had to look into the SoC devices available. We found that the NRF52840 chip was widely supported by different boards and the NXP KW41Z officially supported by the Thread protocol.
However, due to difficulties explained below we could not create a Thread network, so we decided to go with the good old BLE support.

​Hardware components:
- NXP Rapid IoT Prototyping Kit
- Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+
- SparkFun Pro nRF52840 Mini
- GeeekPi nRF52840 Micro Dev Kit USB Dongle
Software:
- Raspberry Pi Raspbian
- NXP MCUVpresso IDE
Click here for more details!  →

Watch Out!!!

The age of electronic mobile devices have swallowed up humanity; slaves of a small shiny screen looking for data and updates on social media, emails, text, etc., we spatially lose any reference of location or the dangerous situations around us.
How many times have we seen people crash into walls, bicycles, runners, and other unfortunate pedestrians, when they completely lose grasp of their surroundings. How many times have we done this ourselves! Accidents wait for no one. Not anymore, with the Watch Out Cap!!!We came up with a cap that senses objects distance and notifies you of possible collisions in front or rear of you.
The sensors are configure to buzz a warning when it senses objects close to 80 cm of distance. The buzz will increase pitch as the distance decreases.

​Hardware components:
- Maxim Integrated MAX32630FTHR
- Pololu VL53L0X Time-of-Flight Distance Sensor
- Buzzer
-Red LED
-Green LED
- Adafruit Lithium Ion Polymer Battery - 3.7v 1200mAh
Software:
​- Arduino IDE
Click here for more details!  →

​Stereo Vision on Netduino

Stereo vision has been one of the most complicated and resource intense process's to extract 3D information. The Netduino 3 Ethernet board, equipped with a Cortex-M4 168 Mhz microprocessor, is capable of intense execution for small amounts of image data.
The board also comes with 4 UART ports ready for use and is perfect for serial communication cameras.
We were able to support the OV528 protocol to communicate with two serial cameras and acquire two continuous photos of still objects. In the near future we will apply one of the stereo vision algorithms to extract the 3D information out of the acquired images.
This system is split into two parts: Part one of the project will mange the hardware and acquire the stereo images on demand, and part two of the project will then calculate internally the 3D coordinates of the object snapped.



​Hardware Components:
- Wilderness Labs (Netduino) Netduino3
- Seeed Grobe - Serial Camera Kit
- Seeed Base Shield V2
Software:
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2015
Click here for more details!  →