Lock Down with a Windows IoT Face Recognition Door System

When we leave our homes and want to be sure that they are secure, we need to have control. If someone wants to get into the house, we need to take care of the things that we have inside; if a person rings the doorbell, we want to see who is ringing it. Or, we want to be able to detect whether somebody is near the house, see the face of the person, and control all these situations. We can control all the devices at home; we can reduce the number of robberies and monitor everywhere in the house. With a secure house, we will not worry about these things.

Home automation solutions are necessary for having a comfortable time at home. If we can control the entrance of the place, the number of people getting into the building, and the number of them that are leaving, this can grant permission to all the rooms at home or especially...

Getting started: Installing and configuring Windows 10 IoT on the Raspberry Pi 3

You are almost ready to plug in the Raspberry Pi 3. Even though your hardware configuration is complete, you'll still need to complete the next section to power on the device. So let's figure out how to install an operating system.

In order to deploy and flash the image of Windows 10 IoT Core, we need to follow the steps outlined in the upcoming section.

Preparation

First, we need to install Windows 10 on a computer Desktop in order to flash Windows 10 IoT Core on the Raspberry Pi 3 device.

Installing Windows 10 Desktop

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Installing Visual Studio

When we install Visual Studio Enterprise 2015, for the installation process, check out Universal Windows App Development Tools include Tools and Windows SDK:

After installing Visual Studio and updating it, we will see the IDE of Visual Studio:

Enabling the Developer Mode on Windows 10 Desktop

We also need to enable the Developer Mode on Windows 10, so we can develop a program for Raspberry Pi 3:

Go to the Developer Mode:

After this, we are ready to start a new program and develop an application.

Creating a first example

After completing the installation of Visual Studio and Windows IoT, we will move on to an example for testing our Raspberry Pi 3 and integrating everything we installed on the board. Let's take a look at this example:

We need to follow these steps:

1. Install Microsoft Visual Studio; this step was performed in the previous section.
2. Install the Windows IoT project templates; go to https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=847472.

Writing our first application

We will create a simple blinking LED and connect an LED to your Windows 10 IoT Core device.

Loading the project in Visual Studio

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Applications for the Internet of Things

In the next section we will show some applications for the Internet of Things.

Real-life examples of the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things is fascinatingly spread in our surroundings, and the best way to check it is to go to a shopping mall and turn on your Bluetooth. The devices you will see are merely a drop in the ocean of the Internet of Things. Cars, watches, printers, jackets, cameras, light bulbs, street lights, and other devices that were too simple earlier are now connected and continuously transferring data. Keep in mind that this progress in the Internet of Things is only 3-years old and it is not improbable to expect that the adaptation rate of this technology...

The architecture of the security system

In the following section, we will explain how the security system works and how it will be operated. The hardware connections of the system are as follows:

• The button (works as the doorbell of the system)
• A relay module that controls the lock or unlocks the door
• Connects the web camera that will detect the person that wants to enter the house
• Speakers that will notify the messages about the system
• When the button is pressed, it will request the image taken by the camera
• The Raspberry Pi 3 is connected to the internet by Ethernet interface

The following diagram shows the elements of the system:

Materials required

These are materials that are required for this project:

• Raspberry...

Future ideas

For future ideas and improving this project, we will discuss ideas about how to develop a real situation. In the following figure, we have the application of an entrance to a school, which can do following:

• Control the entrance with the face recognition system using a webcam
• The entrance door can be configured with a database that logs the date and time a person arrives
• I can store the data about the have the number of people that have entered or left the building
• In some places, it requires the name of the person, the department that he/she visits the place they came from, and so on
• All this information can be stored in a database server and can be controlled from the internet
• When the person or the student enters or leaves the system will send an SMS to their parents

In the following figure, we have the architecture of the system, which will send the SMS when...

Summary

In this chapter, we built a security system that can be applied to different applications. We used a Raspberry Pi 3 as a central interface in the beginning of the project. We set it up, installing Windows 10 IoT Core and configuring and installing the required software and hardware.

In the next part, we installed Visual Studio for developing applications. You learned about the necessary things to operate the Raspberry Pi 3 and the applications that can be developed for the Internet of Things. At the end of this chapter, we built a lock down with a Windows IoT face recognition door system and integrated the software and hardware required for this interesting project.

For future projects, we can apply this kind of technology for doing these kinds of developments and be assured that our devices are really putting forward interesting ideas and can be used in the real world...