Avoid the Bump! #1: Introduction

25 Sep 2017

Hello!

This will be the series of the blog post I write as I discuss my progress with the IoT on Wheels Design Challenge. Thank you, element14 team, for selecting, me as one of the official challengers.

This will be my first design challenge with the Element14 community! Looking forward to a great deal of learning and fun through this design challenge.

As the name suggests, through Avoid the Bump!, I plan to develop a pothole locator, so that all those nasty potholes on the roads are easily traceable and the authorities can fix them up with ease, knowing the actual location of the pothole. My detailed application for the design challenge can be found here.

Just for a quick recap:

The idea is to detect potholes through the accelerometer and mark that geo-location on Google Maps so that tracking them is easy. As the theme is focused on "IoT on Wheels", I intend to communicate the device to the cloud server, through the driver's mobile phone. As WiFi connectivity is not readily available in cars, I plan to stick to the following chain:

The main elements of my Design challenge would be broken down into the following parts:

Algorithm for detecting the potholes
communication from the Nucleo board to the mobile phone via BLE
developing a Mobile App to receive the BLE data from device to the mobile phone and using the mobile phone's cellular data to push the geo-location on the internet. ( Currently would be focusing only on the Android platform, so as to make the project scope limited and realizable in the short amount of time.)
developing a Web interface to store the geo-location in a DB and creating visualizations with Google Maps
developing a suitable and stable power source for the device.

There is a lot of learning involved in this Design Challenge as I plan to include Mobile App and a web interface as well. I'll be glad to share my updates with the community.

Abhijit.