Hardware & IoT

Smart Campus Security & Environmental Monitoring

A real-time hardware monitoring station leveraging MQTT for telemetry and remote visualization.

MicroPython Raspberry Pi Pico W MQTT ThingSpeak

Live Dashboard View Code

Project Type Live IoT

My Role Hardware Engineer

Timeline February 2026 - May 2026

Status Actively Polling

Overview

This system bridges the physical and digital worlds by gathering localized campus data and transmitting it securely to a cloud dashboard. It serves as a proof-of-concept for scalable, low-cost smart campus infrastructure.

Hardware & Sensors

AHT20 & BMP280 Sensors

High-precision digital temperature and humidity tracking combined with barometric pressure sensing for localized weather estimations and environmental baselines.

HC-SR04 Ultrasonic

Distance measurement and zone monitoring for security applications.

PIR Motion Detection

Passive infrared sensing to track movement anomalies across campus security zones.

Raspberry Pi Pico W

The micro-controller brain handling sensor polling, I2C communication, and seamless Wi-Fi transmission directly to the cloud without intermediate gateways.

System Architecture Pipeline

Edge-to-cloud telemetry pipeline routing multi-sensor environmental acquisition over MQTT to persistent cloud storage and live monitoring dashboards.

Edge-to-Cloud Hardware Telemetry Pipeline

MicroPython RP2040 Pico W MQTT Broker Hardware I²C ThingSpeak

01 / Sensor Array

AHT20 / BMP280 Calibrated temperature, humidity & atmospheric baro pressure Hardware I²C Bus · 400kHz

PIR Motion Sensor Infrared anomaly detection with digital latch triggers GPIO Digital Interrupt

HC-SR04 Ultrasonic Microsecond sonic pulse distance measurement & perimeter alerts Trigger / Echo Timing

02 / Edge Controller

Raspberry Pi Pico W Dual ARM Cortex-M0+ running low-power polling loops RP2040 @ 133MHz

MicroPython Kernel Asynchronous sensor scheduler, JSON payload pack & watchdog uasyncio Runtime

03 / Transport Layer

CYW43439 Wi-Fi Direct 2.4GHz 802.11n wireless telemetry without gateway Station Mode · WPA2

MQTT Telemetry Lightweight publish/subscribe payload streaming to broker MQTT QoS-1 · JSON Pack

04 / Cloud & Visuals

ThingSpeak Cloud Persistent time-series telemetry storage & historical trend DB REST API / Ingest

Live Web Dashboard Live gauges, environmental charts & immediate threshold alerts Real-Time Web UI

Edge Compute Dual ARM Cortex-M0+ Bare-metal MicroPython event loops with zero gateway overhead

Hardware Bus I²C Multi-Drop Bus Direct hardware bus polling with precision microsecond timing

Network Protocol MQTT Publish / Subscribe Low-bandwidth telemetry streaming with automatic reconnect watchdog

Cloud Telemetry ThingSpeak Time-Series DB 15s telemetry cadences and live threshold alerting pipeline