Android based Museum guide (Final year Engineering project)

Hello everyone! It's a long time since I'm writing this blog. But I've come up with a new article which is my final year Engineering project. The project is Android Based Interactive Information System using RFID. I'll give you a brief idea of making this project.

7" TFT LCD Touch screen

I'd been to Mumbai's Museum, "Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya" where I found that the museum was using a hand held device which used to give information regarding the artefact in the museum. There you would just place the device near the artefact and the device used to give the information in the form of audio. This concept felt interesting to me and then after returning home I thought why not make a similar thing for my Final year project? This gave me an inspiration for my project.

That hand held device was just a simple basic one. I thought of taking this to the next level. Thus making it on an Android platform as android is used widely among us and that it will be flexible to use. For this I needed a development board to install Android and a processor. I went ahead and bought an ARM11 board with Samsung processor (Detailed specs listed below). Next comes the screen. I wanted to go with the usual TFT screen but later on went with the TFT LCD touch screen. This is where the title gets its name "Interactive".

I'll give you the basic working of my project so that you will get to know better. Say, you are going to visit a museum and that the artifact which is place in museum attracts you and you want to know more about it. But the guide is busy telling other visitors about some other artifact. So in this situation comes in handy the hand held tablet like device which can give you more information about it by just placing the tablet near the object. Now the RFID tag will detect the unique ID given to each monument which will give the respective information about the monument by visual and audio information through external memory card. This information is stored in external memory card so we can add/delete the information in future. There are two language options currently (more language options to be added later) English and Hindi. User will choose either of the language and proceed. Thus creating interest in the visitor. After finishing the visual tour, he/she might exit the app or start with the next monument. Also the user might give feedback regarding the experience so that next user will be served better!

ARM 11 Samsung S3C6410

The specifications of the Arm board and processor is:

Samsung S3C6410 Key Features-
• ARM1176ZJF 533/667MHz VFP/SIMD
• 65nm low-power process
• DVFS power management
• Dedicated x32 mDDR/DDR, x32 mSDR/SDR
• WVGA or higher display resolution
• Hard-wired 3D GFX accelerator
-4M triangles/second
-OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0
• Hard-wired multimedia
-MPEG-4 SP codec: SD/D1 >30fps
-H.264/263 BP codec: SD/D1 >30fps
-VC-1 WMV9 decoder: SD/D1 >30fps
-JPEG/2D hardware
-Hardware rotator & post processor
-TV-out
• 32-channel DMA
• Security hardware: DES/3DES, AES, SHA-1
• High-speed connectivity
-UART interfacing BT EDR 2.0 up to 3Mbps
-High-speed SPI, 50Mbps for mobile TV
-USB 2.0 OTG
-High-speed MMC 8-bit 50MHz
• MMC+/eMMC
-SDHC 4-bit 50MHz for high-density
• SD cards/iNAND 2.0 and WiFi 802.11a/b/g
-I2S for 5.1-channel Dolby and stereo audio
• BOM cost savings by integrating:
-USB host 1.1/USB 2.0 OTG PHYs
-12-bit ADC with TS + built-in FETs
-Direct boot/NAND FS for NAND SLC/MLC,
• moviNAND, iNAND, OneNAND
-TV-out DAC integration
-Built-in keypad controller
• Pin compatible with S3C6400 & S3C6430
• Package: 424 pins, 13x13, 0.5mm pitch FBGA

You can watch the demonstration of the project in the video below.

Hope you liked my work. Thank you!