Marketing Spy

Bander AleneziAnthony DoPhu Nguyen Golriz Sedaghat

ECE411 Practicum ProjectFall 2014

Identifying the Problem

One of the prior goals and challenges of every business is fulfilling the needs of clients and keeping them comeback, but this is not always an easy job! Some of the common ways of finding out about the interests of customers are: video camera recording, smart phone tracking, personalized advertisements, taking surveys, … But each of the aforementioned ways would need considerable financial and human resource investments.

MotivationDepending on the kind of business some ways might be more efficient and feasible to keep track of customers’ interests. In an electronics store, it can be easily done by directly monitoring the number and amount of time that each item is picked up and hold by customers during a business day, for example. This can be an fairly accurate solution which would save a considerable amount of money and human time and effort invested in other ways.

Design ObjectiveTo build a device that can rate customer’s interest in an electronic item by counting the number that item has been picked up and measuring the average time that it has been held in an electronics store. It can particularly be used after launching a new product.

Other Alternatives• Video cameras: Most of the big

chains do video analytics by monitoring in and outside their stores

• Smart phone tracking: Monitoring visitors’ cell signals and creating “heat maps” that glow red where the most foot traffic is

• Personalized advertising: Tiny pinhole cameras built into onscreen video ads, triggering when the customer pick up the item and serving up a message targeting to the needs of the customer

• Monitoring and tracking returns and exchanges

• Online customer rates and reviews

RequirementsA self-operated device which detects the presence of the object and counts up one if the item is picked up and display the cumulative count and the average time that the device has been held.

Our Approach: Concept Generation

Marketing Spy

sensor

Infrared Sensor

Hall effect Sensor

Current Sensor

Microswitch

Processor

MCU

MPU

Display

7-segment

LCD

Power

Battery

AC Power

Power Manageme

nt

Our Approach: Concept Evaluation

Sensor Infrared Quick response, detecting object independent of existence of a magnetic field (Hall effect sensor) or weight of the object (microswitch)

Power Supply

9V DC battery

Less power dissipation, less complexity

Display LCD Ability to display complex characters

Processor

MCU Standalone device, less expensive

Design

Level 1

Level 0

Subsystem Functionality

Power Supply Converts 9V battery voltage to 5V DC voltage

Infrared Sensor Every time a costumer picks up the device by a specific distance ( distance is adjustable by potentiometer) the sensor will activate and send a digital signal to the microcontroller

Microcontroller It receives a low signal from sensor when the item is picked up (signal stays low until the sensor detects the item again), then it increment the counter by one and display the cumulative count and the average time that the device has been held on LCD

LCD Display Control signals from microcontroller drive the segments and display the number of pick up and holding average time

Hardware

Implementation

Implementation

Our final implementation was done using Atmega328P microcontroller, track sensor module consists of infrared reflection sensor and 16x2 Microtivity HD44780 controller LCD.

Implementation

Testing: Hardware & Software

Module Tests• Power• Sensor block • LCD display• Reset push button

Integration Test• Interaction of sensor block and MCU• LCD and MCU

Functional Test Acceptance Test

Results

• System final test result

Contributor Reviewed by

Preliminary design

Phu Nguyen Bander Alenezi, Anthony DoGolriz Sedaghat

Preliminary PCB Golriz Sedaghat Phu Nguyen, Bander AleneziAnthony Do

Testing Bander Alenezi, Anthony DoPhu Nguyen, Golriz Sedaghat

Bander Alenezi, Anthony DoPhu Nguyen, Golriz Sedaghat

Writing Phu Nguyen, Golriz Sedaghat, Bander Alenezi

Bander Alenezi, Anthony DoPhu Nguyen, Golriz Sedaghat

Coding Anthony Do, Golriz Sedaghat

Bander Alenezi, Phu NguyenGolriz Sedaghat

Soldering Bander Alenezi, Golriz Sedaghat

Phu Nguyen, Anthony Do

Contribution

Lessons Learned• Industry design process • Programming and interfacing with

Atmel AVR microcontroller• Learning Eagle CAD Schematic and

PCB layout tool• Improving soldering skills• Learning Github and Redmine

collaboration tools

THINGS DONE DIFFERENTLY IN THE FUTURE:• Concurrent testing during the design

process• Time management and following

project schedule