In the 8th module, our task was to visualize a data set in the physical world and make it interactive. Our project group thought that we should choose a relevant world issue to relate the data to, and therefore came to the subject of refugees.

 

Choosing the topic of refugees led us to find a database compiled by the UN from 1975 up to 2012 which had data on the number of refugees that fled a certain country in a year, the country they fled from and the countries they fled to.

 

I, along with another project member worked on the software side of the project. We built a system in python on a Raspberry Pi Zero; that accepted inputs from an Arduino that handled the year selection using a rotating time-line, an Arduino that received the input from an RFID reader and an RFID reader connected directly to the Pi. The system processed all the inputs, ran SQL statements on the database, and outputted the names of the countries and the number of refugees that fled to each country to the user interface. The user interface had been programmed using Processing and was an animation of colored particles representing refugees floating towards each country's name on the screen.

 

Our team lasercut the outline of the countries in the database and stuck RFID stickers onto them. They were used to select the origin country and a custom destination country.