Unlock the Door with Your Keyboard

Hello! My name is Pedro and I am a member of PET(Tutorial Education Program) from UFES - BR(Federal University of Espírito Santo). My goal with this project is make PET´s member´s life easier building a system that allows you to open a door with a minimum effort. Our day-by-day work include help and assist the Undergraduate students on their University´s projects, giving knowledge and material to complete their tasks. In a busy day we usually assist about 20 students, whom always knocks the door and waits until someone open it. Therefore, it´s interesting to think of a way to automate this process of “welcoming” someone.

StepOne:

First thing to do was try to send a request to the cloud, saying that we want to turn the D3 pin level to HIGH(in this case we used the message "on"; and D3 is the relay pin). That was pretty easy considering all the documents in Particle´s website... And the code was:

With this Code 1 we can use Particle Mobile app and send "on" to a Particle function called doorIot.

StepTwo:

However, we want to control the door while we are busy, studying or working in our computers, and the students feel free to knock any time and don´t spend too much time waiting on until someone opens the door.

The solution was creating a html script that sends a request via POST to the API and returns an arg = "on" to the particle function "Door", when an input type "submit" occurs.

This script generates the following page:

And to make it possible just pressing onde button in your keyboard... you just need to create a shortcut in your desktop and configure this to open with your keyboard(F10 or F1 or any key you prefer).

Future Steps(feel free to comment possible ways to do these next steps):

• Install RFID sensor in the door, so we can enter PET´s makerspace with just a tag.
• Calculate how many students go to PET in a day, in a week or in a month.