Shelter Item Tracker

Device that keeps track of how many items have been handed out. The shelter employee presses the appropriate button every time they hand out the corresponding item.

The Story Behind the Project

My housemate Subrina majored in Industrial Design and currently works the front desk at a day shelter for those experiencing homelessness. To receive funding, they have to keep track of how many of each hygiene item they hand out each day. This was previously being done with tally marks on paper. But with the chaos and number of simultaneous tasks at the front desk, picking up a pencil and marking the appropriate box was often too time-intensive and low priority to do every time, causing statistics to be under-reported.

Now Subrina just has to press a button each time she hands out an item, which is significantly easier and faster, and has caused reported numbers to be more accurate and approximately quadruple.

This was programmatically a pretty simple project. The real challenge was designing the enclosure. I did a significant amount of dimension setting and trigonometry on paper for each face, and Subrina modeled it in Fusion360 so it could be laser cut. Overall, a very fun Industrial Design x Engineering collaboration.

Features

• When unplugged, the Arduino uses the remaining 30 ms of capacitor power to save all statistics to EEPROM, so if the tracker is unplugged in the middle of the day, all statistics are not lost.

• When you click a button, the new total for that item is previewed for 2 seconds before returning to total.

• The item buttons are standard 6mm pushbuttons mounted to a perf board which is mounted to the top face. This allows for the use of buttons which have a much more satisfying tactile feel than the larger panel mount buttons.