Final Year Project (FYP)

This is the story of my Final Year Project (FYP). The goal of this blog post is to share our thought process, get feedback from the readers and hopefully inspire many of you.

Introduction

I'm a final year computer engineering student. As final year students, we are required to produce a capstone project. I am taking this opportunity to brush up my skills and improve my resume

Idea

Together with my FYP-mate, Chandra, we are going to make hardware access control system. Most likely, our project is going to be implemented in our university's Hardware Lab. We are going to design system that:

  • Controls who is able to use hardware (power tools i.e. drill press, grinder, etc.). For instance, only students who have gone through training for a particular hardware will be granted the access.
  • Allows the lab to get usage data which may assist in hardware maintenance and/or upgrade.

The system consists of two main components: a controller device for each hardware and a web app. 

Currently, our plan for the device is to use:
  • ESP8266 as the microcontroller for our device and to communicate with the webapp via wifi.
  • Current sensing (Hall Effect based) module, like ACS712, to calculate the power usage. Might try other methods to calculate power usage, for example using a shunt resistor or a current transformer or a combination of those methods.
  • A NFC reader (MFRC-522) to read user/student card.
  • A Solid State Relay (SSR) to control electricity to the power tool.
  • A LCD1602 Display.
The web app will be developed with Django and deployed on Google App Engine.
The device and web app will be communicating via MQTT protocol, maybe will be using CloudMQTT as its broker.



So the overall tech stacks will prolly be:
  • Hardware: ESP8266
  • Programming/Scripting Languages: C/C++, Python, JavaScript
  • Framework: Django
  • Database: MySQL/CloudSQL
  • Platform: Google App Engine
Also published at medium.com/@vincentalfred and Linkedin.

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