9th Grade Science Fair

Estimated location and number of scanners for the carpool lane of McCall Elementary

BLE carpool

For my 9th-grade project, it was also a hybrid software/hardware project. I decided to tackle the problem of the carpool lane in schools. For schools with young kids, there is always a teacher who has to stand outside, no matter the conditions. They also have to rely on parents having the proper identification (like a piece of paper) showing which kids they are here to pick up. My 9th-grade science fair project aimed to completely remove the need for a teacher to stand outside and for parents to maintain a form of identification.

The hardware

The hardware for my 9th-grade project was way less complicated than my last year's project. It is composed of an ESP32 dev board, some sort of Bluetooth tag, and a battery pack. The amount of each depends on the number of parents and the size of the carpool lane. The scanners (ESP 32 dev boards) only have a certain range, so depending on how big the carpool lane is, how many scanners and battery packs you will need. The approximate range of each dev board can be seen in the example photo above. Each parent will get at least one Bluetooth tag, which is what the scanners are scanning for. The MAC addresses of each Bluetooth tag can be tied to a student or multiple students. One student can also be tied to multiple MAC addresses, for example, if one parent picks up the student one day and the other parent picks up the student another day. The battery packs are just there to power the ESP32 dev boards. The only configuration for the dev boards needed is the wifi name and password, webhook URL (where the scanners are going to send the scanned MAC address information to), and the scanner ID (can be anything, supposed to indicate the position of the scanner in the carpool lane EX: center).

The software

The code in the scanners isn't very complicated. All it does is scan for every Bluetooth device it can, filter out the Bluetooth devices by service ID, look for "0000ffe0-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb" (Every Bluetooth tag has this service ID), and send the MAC addresses of the found Bluetooth tags to the webhook that it was configured for. The main software part of the project was the website that I made using Blazor. It had multiple pages, one that was an introduction page, a page where you could see a list of all the registered devices and the student's information that is tied to the device(s), and a page where you could see the registered devices and students that the scanners are currently picking up. The students' and Bluetooth tags' information is stored in a database, which the website accesses to display the list of registered students and when a scanner detects a registered MAC address.

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