Abstract: Theft is the largest crime committed on College Campuses across the country. According to government statistics for criminal acts, 30,000 or more burglaries related to college students and campuses are reported each year. Students commonly leave their rooms open or are unaware while they are not in the room. We plan to fix this problem with the use a security alarm targeted at college age students. This security alarm uses the Arduino and various sensors to go off when the door it is attached to is opened. Not only will a buzzer go off, alerting the person opening the door what is happening, but it will also send a message to the person living in the room. They can then turn the alarm off by sending a text back. If their room is being broken into, this text will immediately alert them, and they can contact campus security. In addition, if the alarm is not turned off within a certain amount of time campus security will be messaged. The hope is that this security alarm will help cut down on burglaries happening on college campuses across the country. If all goes well, the number of burglaries will be reduced significantly.

Description of project: The idea behind Dorm Alert was to make an easily accessible security alarm that could potential help decrease theft rates on college campuses. Many students come into college with various fears and one of the most common is safety.

Our project makes use of an arduino duemilanove atmega 328. We opted to use the duemilanove instead of the leonardo due to the size of our sketch and the amount of space that is used when uploading information to the internet to send to other sources. Attached to our arduino is an ethernet shield - which connects the arduino to the internet - and a breadboard. The breadboard has connected to it an accelerometer, a buzzer, and a switch. The switch is connected to an analog pin with an output of 5V and to a digital input pin on the other side of the board. In addition there is a pull down resistor to bring the current to ground at all times. When the switch is closed the digital pin will read a value of "HIGH" which our program uses to tell the arduino to calibrate and start using the accelerometer. The accelerometer is used to measure whether the door has been opened or not and if a certain threshold is met the arduino will turn on the buzzer - which is connected through a digital pin set only to high if a door is opened. In addition, the arduino will send a message, through the internet, to Temboo. Temboo is used as a server by us and it sends a message to Twilio alerting them to send a specific message - "Your door has been opened" - to my phone. Temboo is a tech startup that helps simplify code and bring the projects together. Twilio is a cloud communications company that is utilized by various other companies to send text messages and calls for various alerts. Twilio makes it possible to send the text messages that our project is based around. Our code is attached.

When making this project we wanted to make something that a college student would find useful and be available to anyone who needed it, and we think that our goal was achieved.

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