[0] My Capstone Project — Basis

As a system university student, maybe the oldest one, I chose the “smart parking” project to conclude my career. The University of Lanús -aka UnLa- has a vast parking space with no technology at all, so the goal is to show in a mobile app how many spots are available.

The first limit is obvious, I will not cover the area but It would be nice to show the availability of at least five spots.

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With this in mind I started up the way a professional does: draw a sketch.
https://excalidraw.com/#json=2qlR-OXaNAN22SbRpdxc-,7Iw9fFEXCx8CV-ihysCzSw

This is such an irony for all the students I know who, day after day, in all subjects, young or not, no matter what conversation, they all complain about programming in paper. They do not know that it makes you more precise, reduces the time of work and forces you to think before starting to build the wall. If I have to say one thing that university changed me is that in my past days, I always started to code before anything; code was the only thing I worried about. No documentation, no planning, code and screen, trial and error. That was fine when you are a rookie but it is a waste of time. So here is the advice no one asked for:

Always get the things working on paper and then everything is easier and clearer.

Along with my -transitory- mentor, we define three possible ways for the initial info source: we can use sensors, which means we should get in the IoT field -the branch where my mentor comes from-; we could use a digital camera to take photos and then analyze it with IA (we think that there would be lots of examples of this on the web) or we can let the users tell us when a slot is available.

If the user will report if a spot is empty or not, there would be a fundamental drawback: the information could not be accurate. We should choose this way only if we have no other.

A digital camera could be a smart decision: it is cheap, it can cover a huge area with a single picture and there are plenty of examples that can help us to speed up the code. In this case, we would need a lot of processing power. We think this approach works well if you use the camera raised on the ground and attached to an entire pc, and that was not our case.

The decision was made: I have to dust off my Arduino.