Introduction
QUEUE-less is a service for people who are dissatisfied with the time and energy they spend waiting for their turn. The service monitors the size of different queues and gives queuers the power to choose a shorter queue.
The team is working on this idea at the EIT Alumni Startup Days in Eindhoven. We have implemented a prototype counting the number of people in a coffee queue.
As a second iteration we are counting people entering and exiting from a conference room.
In the future we believe that the idea is most suitable for places where people do not want to bother taking out their phone, plan their queuing but want to get to a place faster (amusement parks, ski resorts, monuments, etc.)
Building the Hardware
The following components are used for the prototype:
- The Things UNO
- An Arduino Button
- Arduino Base shield
Building the software
In order to build the software we used two example codes for the moment.
- The Example code from the Things Network library to send data to their server
- The Arduino Button Example to get the data out from buttons
- We came up with a way to store the data for a minute in a variable on the Arduino and only send the number of queuing people after this minute. This suggestion following the guidelines of the The Things Network
Building the node-red flow
We built a node-red flow that connects to the deployed Thing UNOs. The flow checks which device the data is coming from and based on this information routes the data to a respective CSV file that represents the queues.
Building an interface to look at the queuers
We built a prototype of an interface where it is possible to look at the currently queuing people. The page updates itself every minute.
Technologies used for the website:
- jQuery
- Bootstrap
- HTML5 + CSS + Javascript
The morning coffee queue how we tracked with QUEUE-less
Github link
Hereby you can find the link to the Arduino code and the frontend: https://github.com/loveipeter/QueueLess
