TL;DR: Thank you to Adafruit, MathWorks, doctorcdf, the element14 community, and ASU! Problem Statement.
Hello!
I am very humbled to have been selected as a challenger in the Teacher’s Pet Students’ Robotics Challenge. Thank you, Adafruit and MathWorks for sponsoring this competition. Additional thanks to the element14 community and Dr. Christian DeFeo (@doctorcdf) for running the event. I would also like to thank Arizona State University for first teaching me about MATLAB and for whom I will be competing. And thank you, reader, for reviewing my posts and participating in the element14 community!
Besides my current enrollment in ASU’s BSE Electrical and Electronics Engineering program, I also worked in the classroom as a daily substitute teacher and hope to bring these experiences together for this project. This is my first foray into electronics and I expect to be faced with a steep learning curve, but am excited to embark upon the adventure.
As described in my synopsis (http://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-76398/l/teachers-pet-students-robotics-challenge-finalists), my goal is to aid classroom management by taking attendance for the teacher and alerting the teacher to out-of-seat students.
Problem Statement
Develop an inconspicuous device and process, what will collect information concerning the number of students seated, record such information for further use, and posit an alert to the teacher when this information changes. The developed system must be affordable, self-contained, require little-to-no setup, and minimum configuration.
Since this is my first solo venture into electronics / software design, my initial goal is simply to devise a proof-of-concept prototype that might be later used and tested in a real-world classroom scenario.
For this project, I have chosen to work with the Raspberry Pi kit along with MathWork's MATLAB running on Mac OS X.
As always, I am a huge fan of feedback and look forward to working with the kind and generous members of the international element14 community. Please post any contributions, critiques, and comments; I look forward to seeing what you have to share.
Thank you,
Spencer
Tags: "teachers_pet" "attendance_automator" "raspberry_pi" "adafruit" "mathworks" "MATLAB" "ASU"