University group project. The Bath Uni gym was quite small and busy during my second year. To the point going to the gym would turn to a huge time sink. You could argue that uni students can easily waste times in other ways, but still, this was not nice. So we made a laser people counter which generated gym-goers distribution across the day.
I took care of the backend and the micro-controller code which posted to the database. Front end was standard web framework.
I also took responsibility for communications with the university gym so they’d allow us to test this mysterious laser box.
The interesting part was the laser counter hardware, which i did not build (just helped with grunt worker welding for some cables). The guy who made it used 2 lasers, 2 receivers and 2 little mirrors. Direction was determined by the order in which the rays were interrupted, as simple as that. We only had to make one of these since the gym conveniently just had one entrance which also served as exit.
The rest of the team received these raw “PLUS 1 PERSON” / “MINUS 1 PERSON” commands and made live charts of the gym state and also applied some prediction algorithms matched with user preferences to suggest the optimal slot to recommend to the user.
From the user perspective, just cheking the website to see if the gym is crowded or not
This was by far the best group project I’ve ever been involved in at uni. Usually group projects are the worst, a kind of no win situation of “you either do a huge amount of work because nobody else is contributing or you adapt to the group and head straight for a low grade”. This one was different, everyone contributed to the initial idea, and being excited about it, everyone felt a sense of ownership.