Device Finder

Finding HP Printers in a corporate environment

Background
Problem Statement

In September 2016, HP posed a problem for us to solve: that in a large corporate setting, IT was having a hard time keeping track of all the printers that they had to manage on large campuses. In large companies, sometimes printers get moved to different buildings, different offices, or they just die; and IT isn't made aware of any changes. This can pose problems when IT is tasked with finding these printers. Our goal is to create a method of finding these printers, to reduce these problems.

Initial Design
We determined that the best course of action, in order to find printers successfully, was to design and attach a device to the printers, which uses some method of location-determining and reporting back to a central server their location, at intervals. Even if printers go offline, this will allow users to be able to see the last known location of the printer.

Metrics
Location Services *Since the most promising devices have wifi, we left this as a $0 additional cost

Device Features

Wifi Triangulation
We will be using various methods to derive the distance of our device from each access point in its vicinity, and from that, we can use triangulation to narrow its location down.

Document Archive
GitHub Repository