Okay, so I’ve been messing around with this idea of tracking how many people are in a building at any given time. It’s called “people counting,” and it’s supposed to help manage building occupancy. Sounds kinda fancy, right? Well, I wanted to see if I could build something like that myself.
Getting Started
First, I did some digging online to see what other people were doing. I found a bunch of different ways to do it – cameras, sensors, even Wi-Fi tracking. I decided to go with the sensor route because it seemed like the easiest to set up and the least creepy.
The Hardware
I ordered a couple of infrared (IR) breakbeam sensors online. These things are pretty simple – you have a transmitter that shoots out an IR beam, and a receiver on the other side. When someone walks through and breaks the beam, the receiver notices, and you can count that as one person.
I also grabbed a Raspberry Pi – a tiny, cheap computer that’s perfect for this kind of project. It’s like the brain of the whole operation. I already had one laying around from another project, so that saved me a few bucks.
Putting it Together
Wiring everything up was surprisingly easy. I connected the sensors to the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins (those little pins you can use to connect to other stuff). I followed a tutorial I found online – thankfully, someone else had already done something similar!
- Connecting the IR breakbeam sensors to the Raspberry Pi.
- Making sure the sensors were aligned correctly so they’d actually detect people walking through.
- Testing the setup to see if the Raspberry Pi could “see” when the beam was broken.
The Code
This is where it got a little trickier. I’m not a super experienced coder, but I know enough to be dangerous. I used Python, a programming language that’s pretty easy to learn.
Basically, the code does the following:
- Monitors the GPIO pins connected to the sensors.
- Detects when a beam is broken.
- Increments a counter every time a person walks through.
- Prints the current count to the screen(I can look at a number and know how many people there are.)
Testing and Tweaking
I set up the sensors at my doorway and started testing. At first, it wasn’t super accurate. Sometimes it would count me twice, or it would miss me altogether. It needs to be accurate.
I spent a good chunk of time adjusting the sensor placement and tweaking the code. I added a “debounce” delay to prevent double-counting, and I played around with the sensitivity of the sensors. Finally, I got the simple system to be pretty reliable, and then I was satisfied with the result!
Final Thoughts
It’s definitely a basic system, but it works! I can see how many people are walking through a doorway. Now, this is just a starting point. I can imagine adding more features, like a web interface to display the count, or maybe even alerts if the occupancy gets too high. But for now, I’m pretty happy with my little DIY people counter. It’s good for me to record my progress and share it with others.