Basement Engineering

Hey Charles,You are correct. As I mentioned in the Instructable "You can also just not place the sensor above a door ;D". However, this might not work for outside doors that swing inwards, as the sensor is not really weatherproof.The fact that they also used tiny little sensor might be a coincidence, but I think it is very fitting. If you see the sensor itself (4mm*2mm) next to a "normal" distance sensor, such as an ultrasonic module, it really is litteler than tiny :D but I get what you mean.

Hey Xuan,I don't think that I can help you with that. I have never used Home Assistant and don't know how the integration works. But if they use MQTT it should be pretty device agnostic. This means that you just have to find ther right topic to publish to. I would suggest looking for a more general tutorial on how to integrate an ESP8266 into Home Assistant through MQTT.Hope this helps at least a little bit.

Hey Peter, Thanks for your interesting stories:D and sorry for the late response. I spent the last month trying to make my people counter work with other sensor types. And you are right, the ultrasonic sensors are really problematic. I didn't have issues with different kinds of clothing, but with values that were all over the place on a regular basis. The cheap HC-SR04 seem very unreliable but they look very neat on the prototype:D (see photo). I'm also working on using laser pointers, LDRs and a small mirror as cheap light barriers, but that is still a work in progress and will probably take some time. My hope is that this will geive me a very reliable sensor, that works on all kinds of clothing.I also gained some more experience with the VL53L1X on poorly reflecting surfaces and had gre…

Hey Peter, Thanks for your interesting stories:D and sorry for the late response. I spent the last month trying to make my people counter work with other sensor types. And you are right, the ultrasonic sensors are really problematic. I didn't have issues with different kinds of clothing, but with values that were all over the place on a regular basis. The cheap HC-SR04 seem very unreliable but they look very neat on the prototype:D (see photo). I'm also working on using laser pointers, LDRs and a small mirror as cheap light barriers, but that is still a work in progress and will probably take some time. My hope is that this will geive me a very reliable sensor, that works on all kinds of clothing.I also gained some more experience with the VL53L1X on poorly reflecting surfaces and had great success with an increased measurement period (30ms -> 100ms) but such a slow sensor is not very helpful for counting people I guess.

Hey Xuan,Mohammed asked a simmilar question in the comment section. As I told him, you can start in the webUI.cpp. There you would use an mqqt library to send an event.Please refer to my response to Mohammeds question for a more detailed answer :).

Hey Tam, thanks for your comment. To me this behaviour seems to be all right. I programmed it to output what the counter calculated (+1 or -1). It doesn't Output the raw distance. Hope this helps :).

Electronics, trains and legos, this project has everything. I love it. This would be the perfect kind of project for a Maker Faire. Great to inspire small kids and big kids(such as me) alike. Thanks for sharing:).

Hey Mohammed,Thanks a ton, I'm always stoked to hear from people who use my Instructables to build their own verdion:).For MQTT communication The updateWebsocket() function in the webUi.cpp would be a good place to start. It knows the peoplecounter object and checks if the count changed in every loop iteration. Instead of broadcasting something over a web socket, you could place your MQTT post code inside the if statement and you are good to go:).Here is the function:int lastCount = 0;void updateWebsocket(){ socketServer.loop(); int count = myPeopleCounter->getCount(); if(count != lastCount){ String countMsg = String(count); socketServer.broadcastTXT(countMsg); } lastCount = count;}

Always nice to hear such feedback. Thank you:)

Thank you very much:).

Hey Peter,Thank you for the detailed feedback. My university has been closed down since last summer. Therefore I was forced to do all of the developing and testing in my room with my family being the only test subjects. Your experience clearly indicates that I missed a bunch of important test cases.It seems like you have had a lot more experience with the VL53L1X.Would you mind if I cite you and add some of your points to my wakpoints list?I also planned on releasing the code extension to use an ultrasonic sensor in a different Instructable, but I will try to get it ready sooner and add it to this project as an alternative and well established sensor option.I also wasn't really considering users with malicouscous intent. Thinking about it, it is pretty hard to prevent people from spoofing…

Hey Peter,Thank you for the detailed feedback. My university has been closed down since last summer. Therefore I was forced to do all of the developing and testing in my room with my family being the only test subjects. Your experience clearly indicates that I missed a bunch of important test cases.It seems like you have had a lot more experience with the VL53L1X.Would you mind if I cite you and add some of your points to my wakpoints list?I also planned on releasing the code extension to use an ultrasonic sensor in a different Instructable, but I will try to get it ready sooner and add it to this project as an alternative and well established sensor option.I also wasn't really considering users with malicouscous intent. Thinking about it, it is pretty hard to prevent people from spoofing a people counter. You could easily trick even the most advanced camera Sensors, simply by covering them😅.

Thank you, hopefully you were also inspired to build your own counter:).

Hey Hilal,There was actually no real coding or programming involved ( except for the LED strips ). After flashing the flight controller with the right Firmware (ArduPilot Rover in my case) the ArduPilot Software takes care of everything and gives you a nice Interface to play with the parameters. You can actually see the PID Parameter view in Step 8. ArduPilot also offers a great guides that walk you through all of the little steps required to set a vehicle up.

Thank you. You are probably right, I had to do a teeny tiny little bit more, to turn everything into a moving vehicle, even swim through cold water a couple of times, tha are not shown in the video 😅. But it was definitely worth it.We actually had a very expensive algea sensor that was loaned to us by a professor, that uses a similar approach. Algea are fluorescent. The sensor simply shines light of a certain wavelength at the algea and measures the wavelength and intensity of the light that comes back to determine the algea concentration.I even designed and 3D printed a full measuring assembly with pumps, sampling chambers, sediment filtering and so on. I attached a couple of renderings. But as we had limited time to produce a working prototype and realized that we designed the boat to …

Thank you. You are probably right, I had to do a teeny tiny little bit more, to turn everything into a moving vehicle, even swim through cold water a couple of times, tha are not shown in the video 😅. But it was definitely worth it.We actually had a very expensive algea sensor that was loaned to us by a professor, that uses a similar approach. Algea are fluorescent. The sensor simply shines light of a certain wavelength at the algea and measures the wavelength and intensity of the light that comes back to determine the algea concentration.I even designed and 3D printed a full measuring assembly with pumps, sampling chambers, sediment filtering and so on. I attached a couple of renderings. But as we had limited time to produce a working prototype and realized that we designed the boat to small for all of that stuff, we had to scrap that idea. I am actually thinking about incorporating an additional chapter on "the tale of the lost measuring assembly" into the Instructable😏.

Thanks, the university is actually planning on incorporating such a sensor in the future to use the boat for autonomous lake mapping. There is also the option to attach some kind of external assembly that takes water samples at certain coordinates to be analysed in a lab and used for water quality mapping.

Thank you, that is a very welcome reaction😁. The prop size is most certainly not ideal. Their design was mainly driven by coincidence and the limits imposed by the previously designed hull. I simply took a look at the props, that came with the stern tubes for the boat. The ones that I accidentially broke😅 and remodelled them in Fusion. They were about 30mm in diameter and had 3 blades. I scaled them up as much as possible until they would almost touch the bottom of the hull in my model. After the First printed pair of propellers broke, I reduced the diameter a little bit and increased the blade thickness to 2mm. The project has probably schown, that I am not much of a boat guy but they work surprisingly well.

Thank you:)

Thank you. I hope it gets a bunch of people to play around with ArduPilot. Well knowing that the first and second and third and the ... attempt to make a vehicle self driving might fail, but those issues are to bei expected and they can get there eventually:).

Thanks you:)

Thank you. I'm glad that you liked it. Especially the Video😁. It would habe been a real Shame to leave this project unfinished. It might have been a pain in the a** but it was super interesting. Maybe i'll sommeday finish all of my others unfinished projects as well😅

Thats Great, be sure to upload some Photos of it. And let me know, if you are running into any problems, maybe I can help:).Eso es genial,asegúrese de subir algunas fotos de la misma. Y avíseme, si tiene algún problema, tal vez pueda ayudar :).

Thank you :).I bought 2m of the aluminium at my local hardware store (toom Baumarkt) here in Germany. It cost me 12 Euros.

Thank you :).

Thanks, I tried to keep it simple and easy to make a lot of them.

This is a truly amazing project. I absolutely love your way of using wires, solder, LED's, a steady hand and a ton of creativity to create such beautiful art pieces. I also love the video, you did a great job in showing the process. I wonder how long it took you to edit the LED count :D, but i really appreciate it. Keep up the good work, I'm rooting for you to win the contest.

This is a truly amazing project. I absolutely love your way of using wires, solder, LED's, a steady hand and a ton of creativity to create such beautiful art pieces. I also love the video, you did a great job in showing the process. I wonder how long it took you to edit the LED count :D, but i really appreciate it. Keep up the good work, I'm rooting for you to win the contest.

This is a truly amazing project. I absolutely love your way of using wires, solder, LED's, a steady hand and a ton of creativity to create such beautiful art pieces. I also love the video, you did a great job in showing the process. I wonder how long it took you to edit the LED count :D, but i really appreciate it. Keep up the good work, I'm rooting for you to win the contest.

I used Libre Office to create the stickers

Hey, i just read through the log file and saw, that you are using my code package from January 8th. I updated all of the files this weekend and uploaded them to github, so i can easily maintain them. All of the new links are in the Instructable. On my PC compiling for the Nano and the Uno worked without any issues. I suggest you download those files and try compiling ones again.Contact me if the issues still remain, i'm sure we can figure it out :).

Hey, thanks for your feedback. Sounds like a good plan, make sure to share a few photos of it:).I spent this Sunday organizing the Code and increasing the readability. I also moved all of the files over to my new GitHub account. As a first step, i would suggest you download the latest files and try it again. Keep in mind that you will have to unzip all of the files with WinRAR or 7zip before you can use them. I hope this helps.If you still run into issues, feel free to come back to me.

Thanks for that. It sure was a ton of work, and you probably know how tricky debugging can become from your Colorful Clock project:D. However, i also had a lot of fun building it.

Thank you. Unfortunately i have started my next university semester so my free time is pretty much completely gone. However,on my last Maker Faire, i talked to a couple of guys from a company, that makes educational electronics kits. They liked the clock and offered me to turn it into one of their kits. I am currently considering to give it a shot. I will update you if this turns into an actual product:).

Thank you very much, calling it one of your personal best read up's is a great honor to me:). By the way, you are very good at video compositing.