Evolved traditional piggy bank: a hardware enhanced approach to savings / Olivia Unca Lian

Nowadays, instead of implying the habits of saving money, children tend to just depend on their parents or guardian whenever they are in need of using money. Besides, most of them may think that a simple coin box is boring and does not have a great safety feature which leads the children to have no interest in developing the habits of saving money since everyone could access the coin box. Therefore, an Evolved Traditional Piggy Bank project was proposed to create a smart coin box which integrated with the IoT Technology and engaged with the biometric sensor as the safety feature in order to help the parents to increase their children’s interest in saving money. This project also offers an innovative way for the parents to track their children’s saving activities by monitoring from their mobile phones as this project engaged with the mobile apps to track and monitor every saving made by the children. In this project, both software and hardware were used to develop the Evolved Traditional Piggy Bank model. For the software, this project integrates with IoT itself by using mobile applications from smartphone called Blynk for the parents to monitor their children’s saving activities. As for the hardware, this project uses fingerprint sensor to detect the fingerprint and open the coin box but on the other hand, the parents also could open the coin box using the Blynk apps. Other than that, an ultrasonic sensor was also used to determine the level of the coin box whether it still has the space for the coin to be inserted or not. The gauge features in the Blynk apps would show the distance of coin from the ultrasonic sensor and parents could monitor it through their mobile phones. The main component for this project is the coin acceptor, it is used to detect the coin value and for this project, this Evolved Traditional Piggy Bank would automatically total up the money inside the coin box after a coin was inserted. The total coin would be displayed on both LCD of the coin box and also could be monitored on the Blynk apps. Therefore, parents could easily develop saving habits among their children.