NOTHOLE

nothole in the making...still integrating the sensor and ESP here

what is a...nothole?

Nothole is a sensor system on a car that can sense potholes + their severity + their location, and send this back to a central server application that can consolidate this data for usage by government officials and construction workers to provide for more efficient repavement of roads. This project won my group 1st place in HackMIT Blueprint's beginner track! 

we had two parts: sensor (ultrasonic sensor) + server system via ESP8266 

 So technically...pothole detection has been done before (there are whole articles on it). What HASN'T been done before is consolidating it on a server. Ideally, we wanted to make a Google Maps application (using the JS API) but couldn't since we ran out of time in the 7 hours we had to build this.

My partners, Jasper and Alex, focused on making the ultrasonic sensors work without fault + setting up the demonstration. On the other hand, I spent my hours figuring out how to get our ESP on an IP address and for pothole data to be sent live onto this server.

Why did it take me so long? 

*There was a popular library we needed on the Arduino IDE that didn't exist so we had to do MAJOR restructuring of unfamiliar code

*We originally wanted to do arduino to arduino communication, but ended up changing after 4 hours in and just making my PC the client

*ALSO the number of reboots we had to do on the ESP was insane! the internet (probably since 200 kids were using it and I might have had...30 tabs open) was kicking me off constantly.

I think at one point, the first judge came to our table and our nothole sensor was working FINE before dinner (period of time we had before judging), and then my PC went offline after dinner.

My team mates were explaining our idea to the judge while I frantically tried to get us back on the server. I think they almost gave up after the first judge, but I persisted, got the server back up in our time of need, and we had an amazing demonstration for every other judge (who told us they convinced the first one afterwards that our project was great it was just MIT media lab wifi). 

All in all, this was a great project-- it inspired me to:

*Learn ML 

*Code every day

*Learn github + collaborate on github

*GO TO MORE HACKATHONS ahahah here I come! 

I learned so much-- persistence, teamwork, and server architecture to name a few-- at this hackathon. I also had the pleasure of talking to some cool people, listening to Prof. Shen^2's lecture, and even cleared up my basics of hardware. I want to focus more on hardware projects, and I hope this blog will witness many more of these in the next few months : )