Project Peek-A-Spot is a privacy focused occupancy detection system designed for study rooms within the Loyola Science Center (LSC) at the University of Scranton. Students currently spend unnecessary time searching for available study rooms, often walking through multiple rooms only to find that each room is occupied. Existing solutions such as a traditional security camera introduce major privacy concerns, and are not appropriate for student study environments.

The system includes MLX90640 infrared thermal sensors, ESP32-POE2 microcontrollers, a Raspberry Pi 5, and a university provided Ubuntu server host. Only three rooms were tested during this project.

Each esp32 communicates occupancy information over ethernet using HTTP POST requests to a Raspberry Pi 5 acting as a temporary gateway and testing server. The raspberry pi processes incoming JSON data and updates a frontend website displaying room occupancy status. The server hosting the website is an Ubuntu provided by the university’s infrastructure and networking departments.

The languages used for this project were C++, CSS, Javascript, HTML, and Python.