oshiot :: Door Counter

Intro

Open Source Hardware (OSH) Internet of Things (IoT) People Counter is an affordable way for libraries to automate gathering statistics about the number of people who use their facilities.

Public libraries need to keep track of how many people use their services. This data is used when applying for state grants, justifying future initiatives, as well as private fundraising. The librarians in my consortium would prefer an automated way to gather and record these statistics so they can spend their time delivering face-to-face services such as storytimes and book clubs.

Although motion detector gates and people counters exist in the marketplace, they can be prohibitively expensive for the smaller rural libraries in my consortium.

Dan Alexander and Robin Hastings at the Northeast Kansas Library System invited me to expand their work building an open source version of a people counter. I built on their work using a raspberry pi powered Passive Infra Red (PIR) sensor to gather statistics about facility usage and connected this to the Ubidots account they had established for this purpose. The result is the OSHIOT Door Counter

I think it would be interesting to get several libraries to participate in a study comparing the accuracy of the OSHIOT Door Counter to other methods of data collection, such as counting heads or keeping tally marks.

The following tutorial guides you through the process of building your own OSHIOT Door Counter and setting up an Ubidots web dashboard to view the statistics.

You can see a video demonstrating the finished product here https://youtu.be/ABtHFpEBv8E.

If you have any questions, you can reach me at [email protected]

Thank you and have a great day! Muriel Green October 4, 2017

last updated September 19, 2018