Month: February 2022

The beginning of this week was spent by me practicing and delivering our proposal presentation. As per our gantt chart, I spent the rest of the week researching sensors and a literature review of existing curbside sensor module systems. Specifically, I focused on ultrasonic sensors and tried to find out if it sufficiently provides all the information that we will need. After watching some videos (https://youtu.be/7a1fiUJtp_k) and reading some articles (https://www.avnet.com/wps/portal/abacus/resources/article/pir-and-ultrasonic-sensors-whats-the-difference-and-how-do-they-work/), I concluded that ultrasonic sensors would provide all the required baseline information, and the PIR sensors would help in cases such as detecting human/animal movement in front of our spot modules. Next, I proceeded to think about the technical requirements for weatherproofing our system. When snow is plowed throughout the city, curb side parking is almost never included. This could be one edge case that we might not be able to handle. Next week, I will focus on researching the best way to arrange the sensors on the curb to be able to detect cars with high accuracy.

I spent the very early part of this week completing my section of slides for the proposal presentation. The latter part was spent researching the communication and storage design requirements our system might need. I looked into wireless techniques that were applicable to smart city parking lots and explored their tradeoffs and implementation subtleties. The wireless technologies I explored were Cellular (4G), Zigbee, Wi-Fi and LoraWan  (https://blues.io/blog/network-connectivity/). Wi-Fi was a widely-adopted solution on Arduino boards and had documentation on connectivity to an MQTT broker or upstream database. Cellular and LoraWan (https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/) )had smaller bandwidth but more easily usable outside and consumed lower power. This week I hope to settle on one of these three choices after experimenting with E2E that its protocols are compatible with an Arduino/Raspberry IDE to send data to a subscriber.