Get the latest tech news

Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab

who knew figuring out the lab's occupancy would be so much work?!

The first iteration of the people counting system (as built by Michael Berkey) utilized a Logitech C920 camera mounted on a vantage point that had a clear view of the room. I considered using similar components for a door status checker for the UPL — it wouldn’t have been too much effort to buy WiFi enabled ESP32 modules and off-the-shelf door-mountable reed switches. While there are some ways to emulate the specific requests a typical browser would use to authenticate with your NetID, it would be a ton of recurring effort (and the login it used would have to be changed as people graduated)!

Get the Android app