Beta IT Requirements

The Measure the Future Beta partners will be helping the project ensure that our progress over the next 6-12 months are done with an eye towards answering the right questions, enabling libraries to be successful with our sensors and data, and that we maintain our strict attention to the security of the data that we are collecting. This page will outline the installation requirements for our Beta Partners. If you have any questions about these requirements, please let us know.

Power Requirements

The Beta Partner Scout sensors are based on the Raspberry Pi microcomputer, and thus have the same power requirements as a stand-alone Raspberry Pi:

5 Volts at 2.1 Amps

The Scout end of the plug is a micro-USB (the small USB that is used by most Android phones and other small electronics). The other end of the cable can be delivered as either a standard USB plug (useful if you are using the Scout somewhere with an existing powered USB such as near a computer, some wifi adapters, and more) or a standard ungrounded US style wall plug. Because installation of the Scout is usually recommended to be at a high angle relative to the room (high on a shelf, along the top of a column, on the ceiling) there is the potential to also power them via Power-over-Ethernet with an adapter that turns POE into USB.

Networking Requirements

There will be two possibilities during the Beta period for networking, depending upon whether you would like to test the Cloud Mothership that is development now. The simplest installation requires no networking at all.

Local-only

In this setup, each Scout is also its own Mothership, both recording data and acting as a wifi visualization server. Each unit will be its own wifi server, providing its own secure wifi signal that must be connected to via a computer, tablet, or phone in order to load the heat map and data download. The wifi SSID is typically hidden, and secured via a WPA2 password, thus lowering the potential for patron disruption. The wifi operates on the 2.4Ghz spectrum, but is very low power and can be set to a channel of your choosing, if necessary. The Scouts do not, in this configuration, need any access to the library network at all, and operate completely separately.

Cloud Mothership (in development)

We expect the cloud based Mothership visualization engine to launch during the Beta period for testing, and if your library would like to take advantage of the additional power and ease of use of it, the Scouts must be put on a wifi network in order to communicate with the Cloud Mothership server. You will be able to transition existing Scouts from Local-Only to Cloud if you wish, and consolidate access from multiple Scouts into a single instance of the Cloud Mothership.

This transition will require each Scout to be allowed onto the library wifi network, although access can be restricted to only the addresses and ports necessary for the transmission of data to our server. If the library chooses to go this direction, they will no longer access their data “locally” by connecting directly to each Scout, but will instead connect to our Cloud Mothership portal, and have access to their visualizations (such as heat map) and data downloads from the portal directly, regardless of how many scouts they have.