CampusEMonitor: Intelligent Campus Environment Room Monitoring System

Abstract

It is important to monitor, analyze and make decisions to ensure the comfort of students and staff on campus as well as maintain an optimal operating environment for various equipment. Server/switch rooms may become hot due to air conditioner failures unknown to the staff. These undetected failures cause servers to switch off, affecting service delivery. In other cases, unsafe gases may occur in the environment. This situation may be unknown to management and the environmental conditions can cause personal discomfort. We present CampusEMonitor, which monitors environment parameters. CampusEMonitor is capable of monitoring temperature, humidity and environmental gases in campus spaces and can be used for quick decision making. Additionally, CampusEMonitor can be configured to trigger various types of alerts, such as emails, automatically to notify staff of unfavorable conditions. CampusEMonitor was developed as a low-cost system using Raspberry Pis, sensors and open-source software used to display information on dashboards in real-time and trigger alerts. Retired cell phones are also repurposed here to reduce cost. Interviewed staff members revealed instances where CampusEMonitor reported anomalies in the campus environment and proved to be a system that can monitor campus environments and send suitable alerts to the appropriate personnel.