Within a school or college there are many items which for health and safety reasons need to be regularly checked and records kept of when the checks were made. Fire Extinguishers must have a tagged locking pin, be correctly mounted and have been serviced within one year. Emergency lighting must be tested and battery health monitored. These checks are required to comply with legislation and insurance conditions. There must be a record made of checks being carried out. In many cases these checks are performed with a clipboard and paper forms, transferring the results and dates into a spreadsheet.
All of the assets require a physical check on a routine basis. The finished project will provide a digital method for collecting the data associated to each asset after a check is performed. The data will be collected on a small handheld device that can easily be carried around. The device will have a QR scanner and a colour display. Assets will be identified by attaching a small unobtrusive label displaying a QR code and an asset number. When a check is made the technician simply scans the QR code attached to the asset and then records the test/inspection results by clicking through an on-screen questionnaire. The scanner device can also warn the user if an asset is overdue a check. The data held on the scanner device is used to produce an excel spreadsheet for storage and reference.
The whole system must be affordable. The asset checks for regulatory conformity are often made by an employee within the health and safety department or are delegated to a member of the facilities personnel. Restrictions in budgets of these departments are common.
The system will be fully usable as a stand-alone system that requires no access to the local network or the broader internet. If used in this way the data logged by the scanner device can be passed via a USB memory stick. If the IT department is involved in the deployment the system can benefit from use of the local network/Wi-Fi (benefits include wireless exchange of data, real-time updates to central records via Wi-Fi, raising work tasks via an API to the help desk system). The system will be flexible for both approaches.
The system can provide a great learning opportunity. The system will be released with a licence that allows an educator full access to the code and schematics. The scanner device will be built around a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller and coded using MicroPython. The scanner device offers an exploration of microcontrollers, UART and I2C interfacing, LiPo cell management. Lessons in ergonomic enclosure design and CAD/CAM. Colleges can modify and improve all parts of the system.