Smart Exhibit: Blog #7: Wrap up

27 May 2021

Hello!

Today is the last day of the building period of Design For A Cause 2021 , so I will summarize what I managed to do and what can still be done in the future

The scope of the project

Develop a prototype of an IoT device which can be easily attached to a museum's exhibit for:
- helping the museum's staff in preserving the exhibit in the best conditions
- improving the interaction between the exhibit and the public.

How the Smart Exhibit works now

The Smart Exhibit uses different sensors (temperature, humidity, illumination, motion (detection of self motion and surrounding motion) and sound) and actuators (LED, speaker)
The Smart Exhibit reads periodically the sensors' values (with different periods for different physical phenomena)
The sensors' values are uploaded to Arduino IoT Cloud where they are displayed on a dashboard
The persons from the museum's staff can watch this dashboard and when a dangerous situation is observed (e.g. a very high increase of the temperature in a very short time), an audible alarm on the Smart Exhibit can be triggered manually from the dashboard
The persons from the museum staff can ask the Smart Exhibit about the status (i.e. if it is alive or not) in order to know if the device is still running or not
The Smart Exhibit sends periodically different facts about the exhibit via Bluetooth Low Energy to all the visitors' smartphones connected to the Smart Exhibit's service
The visitors can ask the Smart Exhibit to get as an answer different information (e.g. name, author, age)

How the Smart Exhibit can be further improved:

Automatic triggering of the alarms in case when a dangerous situation is detected (e.g. movement of the exhibit)
Automatic notifications sent to the museum's staff when a dangerous situation is detected using AWS and Simple Notification Service
A dedicated smartphone application for interacting with the exhibit (with different features for visitors and for the museum's staff)
Possibility to ask verbal questions to the exhibit using AWS and Alexa Voice Service
Testing in a real (or close to real) scenario.