MANARA- Our IEA Raspberry Pi Competition Product

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• published: 28 Apr 2016
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After the Arab Spring, especially the ongoing conflict in Syria, over 4.6 million Syrians have become refugees, with nearly half of them being children. A main issue with such mass displacements is the continuation of children’s education after leaving their homes due to conflict. In fact, international organizations such as UNICEF and UNHCR have made it their goal to provide refugee children with this education. However, given the uncertainty of these children’s circumstances and the unpredictability of camp life, it may be difficult for such organizations to properly monitor the regularity of these refugees receiving an education. MANARA, an attachable Bluetooth emitting plastic token, is a product providing easier methods of monitoring the comings and goings, as well as the overall attendance of refugee children seeking educational benefits. Its functionality is based on the use of Bluetooth 4.0 (Low Energy), online servers (google Firebase), MANARA beacons (Bluetooth Emitters) and the Raspberry Pi (Receiver). By integrating Bluetooth with the Raspberry Pi, MANARA was able to detect incoming Bluetooth Devices (Beacons) and was able to compare the detected devices with registered ones on a private server (Google Firebase), filtering out the devices not present on the server. It was then able to log the comings and goings of registered devices within the vicinity and with further development could send the logs to a database for further data analysis by international organizations. This may provide easier methods of managing the refugee students and may help these organizations in the management of student transportation, division of students among facilities, and fund allocation. We chose MANARA as the product name because a MANARA, or lighthouse, is a guide for ships in hard times which provides an easier path for them to take to reach safety. We wish our product to help organizations similarly, and to be a source of benefit when monitoring the refugee children’s education. Operation Method: Upon powering the Raspberry Pi, the program runs as follows: · Switch is closed to start the program. · Led lights up indicating that the program is running. · Pi opens a csv (comma-separated values) file which will be used to store the incoming data. · Pi searches for Bluetooth signals. · Compares received signals to those registered as students on a server, Google Firebase. · Separates Bluetooth addresses into those registered on the server and those not registered. · Those present are noted in the csv file · This repeats to transcribe all registered students present in the vicinity until the end of the day. This is what we would consider the first prototype for the testing of our idea and helped us grasp the fundamentals of coding with the integration of valuable topics, such as the Internet of Things. Throughout this project we were able to interlink multiple different libraries and systems in order to achieve our basic objective of being able to detect all Bluetooth devices in the vicinity and divide them further, identifying those who’s addresses were registered on our firebase server. With further work, this product may eventually be commercialized as a standalone product, and may be used in a multitude of situations, though benefiting the Syrian refugees is the primary objective for now. Also, after testing the product, the hardware necessary for the Bluetooth receiver is inexpensive, only consisting of the Raspberry Pi, a Wi-Fi dongle, a Bluetooth dongle and a power supply. Overall, this prototype cost about $60 in total, though it can be greatly minimized if we develop our own hardware and boards. Also, the dongles are around $10 a piece, though manufacturing large amounts of them may decrease the price to a more affordable level.