I am very much green when it comes to arduino but I have been trying to do some research and learn as much as I can.
I am working on a project that I want to use a photoelectronic sensor to count things. This is very hypothetical but this is a situation that is very similar to what I would like to do. Essentially the idea is there are three doors a person can enter a room through and three separate doors they can exit the room from. I would like to be able to track the number of people that enter the room and what door they enter from and then how many people leave the room and what door they are taking to leave the room.
I would like the arduino to be able to tell me which door the people entered from and which door they excited from. I would like the exit doors to be able to use Bluetooth to send the data back to the Arduino connected to the doors at the entrance to the building. Would this be something that an Arduino would be able to do?
I am sorry if this is pretty vague but I will answer any questions you might have to the best of my ability. Thank you so much in advance for helping someone who is very new to this.
If it's just counting door use then it sounds easy enough for an Arduino.
It might sound easy but this is a very hard project to do successfully. Unless you funnel people through a turnstile, you see people are unpredictable. Going through in pairs, holding hands, and reversing when half way through the door.
The VL53L1X is an Arduino compatible Time of Flight ranging module that can give enough information to count people in and out through a single doorway.
ST has code and a description of the people counter algorithm posted here. Two minute video demo here..
I think someone has ported it to Arduino, look around on the web. It would be an advanced project.
Yes but I did read a post here that some one was having a problem with exactly this system and set up. They couldn’t make it work reliably in a real world situation. It was fine in tests but in real life people don’t behave like they do in tests.
Jremington thank you but thats not really what I am trying to do. I think I did a poor job explaining what I am looking for so I will try with a different scenario. Basically I have a hoop and I want to count the number of items thrown at the hoop and the number of items that pass through the hoop so I can get a percentage of items passing through the hoop. Hopefully this scenario makes a little more sense sorry for the confusion earlier.
I would like the arduino to be able to tell me which door the people entered from and which door they excited from.
Can you persuade the people carry RFID tags or something which emits a uniquely identifiable signal ? Tracking a person from entry through to exit is not going to be easy, but I don’t believe that is actually what you want.
Really, what information are you attempting to gain from this system? It sounds like similar projects trying to determine current room occupancy. The sort of systems that are used in some shops here at least to enforce covid-19 related social distancing and maximum occupancy limits. If so, then the main challenge is to find a sensor that can accurately count individuals moving in both directions past the sensor (or array of sensors). The main problems in doing accurately this have already been mentioned.
You can also, for a rough estimate, measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the room, since this will have some relationship with the number of occupants.
The inter-communication between all the sensor nodes and a controller is a relatively simple task with standard solutions.
It’s fine I appreciate everyone’s assistance however there seems to be a little lost in translation since I don’t feel comfortable saying exactly what I am working on since I don’t want the project picked up by someone else hence the scenarios. So thank you for all your help I will have to just go at this project in a different approach.