Customer Tracker

The aim of this project is to aid those who may be hearing impaired. Regarding a retail environment, employers are often encouraged to not hire people who may be hard of hearing, this is often because they are unable to hear if a customer has walked into a store and as such could result in stock loss. This project will assist those who are hard of hearing as it will provide visual representations of whether a customer has walked into a store. It will forward a notification to the employer’s device (whether that be their mobile or a dedicated work device) that will notify them if a customer has walked in or out of the store. The notifications to the mobile phone are timestamped so it will allow business owners to monitor their CCTV and track if something may have gone missing. The system will also have an LED light that displays if a customer/s is in the store.

Overview

As mentioned above this system is designed to evaluate the flow of traffic, this implementation is focused predominantly on a retail store which has a dedicated entrance and a dedicated exit. When someone passes in front of the entrance the movement will be tracked by the ultrasonic sensor. Once this movement has been detected the ultrasonic sensor will alert the RPi code to add to the customer tracker counter. It will also initiate two webhooks.

The first webhook is a cloud request to the particle device. Connected to this device is an LED light. This light has been coded to turn on when a customer is in the store. This is updated by the customer tracker count that is built into the RPi code.

The second webhook is the iFTTT trigger. This will call said webhook which will send a notification directly to your mobile phone or other devices connected to the iFTTT account. Integrated within each webhook is a timeout request so that it does not get stuck within an endless wait cycle.

Before you start

Before beginning this project you'll need to create a particle account. This will allow you to use their IDE for the particle Argon device that is used within this project. To help with creating a particle account and setting up the device please visit the following tutorial: https://docs.particle.io/quickstart/argon/

You will also need to identify the token ID of your device. The device ID can be found in the device settings within the console. You will also need to retrieve your access_token for particle. To retrieve your particle acces_token complete the following:

In your computers Command Line Interface (CLI) type: bash <( curl -sL https://particle.io/install-cli )

Wait for this to install, you will then need to generate the token by typing the following in the CLI: particletokens create

This will provide you with the access token. Please remember to keep these for code implementation.

You will also need to create an iFTTT account. To create an IFTTT Account and to familiarise yourself with the service please view the following guide: https://ifttt.com/explore/welcome_to_ifttt

Within iFTTT you'll need to setup two webhooks, one named customerIn and the other named customerOut. Both of these webhooks will be webrequests and will prompt the service 'Notification'. You will then need to access the documentation of your webhooks to get the payload curl command for your two events. The RPi code already has the curl commands with the links, you just need to update the curly braces in the URL.

For more assistance with webhooks and iFTTT please visit the following guide:

https://hevodata.com/learn/ifttt-webhook/#:~:text=Users%20can%20implement%20a%20Webhook,Webhooks%20using%20simple%20Web%20Requests.

This project was made as part of an assignment submitted to Deakin University, School of IT, Unit SIT210 - Embedded Systems Development