Overview

When you need to immediately assess a situation, let the Meraki portfolio do it for you! By leveraging the people counting function of MV Sense, the smart LED of your choosing, and the Meraki MT30 smart button, you can have have control over the IoT environment.

The people watcher project is an integration that leverages the Meraki MV object detection capabilities with an LED indicator to report results. Two modes are supported:

• Detection - Activated upon a short-press of the MT30. A green light is lit when no one is detected, red light when someone is. It returns to green, when no cameras detect people. Answer questions like:

  • Is anyone waiting in the lobby?

  • Can I shut off the floor lights?

  • Is the conference room occupied?

  • Is the restricted area empty?

• Alarm - Activated upon a long-press of the MT30. The light is off when no one is detect, but flashes furiously, if any camera detects a person, until reset. Answer questions like:
  • Has anyone passed this way?
  • Was anyone ever in the secure area?
  • Did the person I expect to show up arrive?

Required Components

• Meraki MV - as many as appropriate for the coverage area.
• Raspberry Pi - any model would work, as long as it support WiFi. I used an RPi Zero W, which also necessitated the purchase of a USB OTG cable.
• A smart LED - many are supported by the library. I used an Embrava Blynclight.
• An MT30 - since you already have an MV, you have an IoT gateway, as well!

This is a 100% event-driven automation, with an MQTT broker receiving the notifications. MV Sense is used to announce the presence of a person / people and the MT30 will announce button presses. A python script subscribes to the corresponding MQTT topics, switches modes based on whether a long or short button press was detected, and makes an API call to the smart light, as necessary.

All software components can run on the Raspberry Pi, but there are a few layers of processing:

• MQTT broker: The Mosquitto MQTT Broker is the de facto open source solution. This is a light-weight software solution with simple installation.
• Python script: A custom Python integration was created to listen for detection of people or button presses, select the appropriate behavior, and control the smart LED.
• Smartlight API: The BusyLight API server software offers various endpoints to control USB-attached smart LEDs.

Once you have these components in place, your MT + MV integration is ready to do the looking for you!