2. Initial Idea¶
As of Week 1, I am thinking of making an anti-theft alarm system for official passports. The sketch image is attached herewith.
2-1. General Description¶
It consists of two components:
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A small thin tag embedded in a thin cardboard-like paper card: Equipped with a bluetooth device powered by a button battery.
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Mobile interface: Installed in the mobile phone.
The tag is inserted into the vinyl cover for the passport. As long as the passport and the mobile phone stay in a close distance, within 10 meters for example, nothing happens. But the passport is brought away from the mobile phone, the mobile phone sounds the sirens.
2-2. Target Users¶
The primary target is those who are residing in foreign countries with a official passport issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of their home country.
2-3. Background¶
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When I was engaged in the foreign service as the head of the mission of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), I had always been facing the risk of the incidents that the JICA officials working in the same country, as expert, volunteer or administrative staff, have their official passport lost or stolen while they are traveling the third countries. Most of the incidents happen in the transit airports or cities before they reach the final destination. Once they lose their official passport, the head of the mission has to submit the first incident report to the JICA headquarters in Tokyo. Then the headquarters is blamed by the Ministry due to their mismanagement of the government asset, and that may affect our own performance assessment as the head of the mission.
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I once took this issue so seriously and insisted that it’s useless for us to rely only on the self human efforts of the passport holder so that they should always stay alert and keep an eye on their passport. It’s impossible to minimize the risk only by the human efforts and I thought that there could be some room for technology to complement the human capacity. Therefore, I drafted a project proposal to prototype the theft alarm system locally in collaboration with the local FabLab in the same country and requested the JICA headquarters for the extra budget allocation to my office. Unfortunately my proposal was rejected by the officials saying that it’s not the matter for one country office alone to work on the solution for all the country missions around the world. Five years after this battle with the headquarters, JICA has not initiated any prototyping project yet and still been relying on the human efforts.
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Another issue with regards to my relationship with JICA was that only a few officials were aware of the potential of decentralized production and open-source. Although there were already FabLabs near them, most of the officials have not paid attention to those labs and never thought of connecting their development cooperation programs to the FabLabs. I really wanted them to feel that it’s not that difficult to work on machine operations, soldering and assembly. Through this practice of local production of the open-source device at the local lab, I want them to learn more about FabLabs.
2-4. System Diagram¶
As part of the individual assignment for Week 10, I made the first system diagram. Although there were a slight changes of my idea described in the diagram, I feel that it still makes sense for the readers to see how I reshaped my idea for the final project. By listing up two previous diagrams for Week 10 and Week 16, you could see how I changed the idea for the system.
Week 10
Week 16
Notes: Here are the changes I have made to my idea of Week 10.
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As I wrote in 3. Board Selection, I changed the development board from Xiao ESP32C3 to Raspberry Pi Pico W.
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I dropped the idea of attaching the LED blink function. I would rather leave this up to further local customization by the users at the FabLab in their neighborhood.
Week 18 (Final)
