Introduction: Automated Street Lighting

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About: Junior Data Scientist with a keen interest for gaining useful information from data and steering positive knowledge . I also love electronics and create things from time to time .

Sensors have become a day-to-day feature in our lives. Nowadays most mobile phones are equipped with fingerprint sensors, motion sensors & the newly arrived iris scanners. These sensors are provided as a form of biometrics to the device. But sensors can have a lot of other applications. One such application is to control various electronic gadgets according to the need of the user. Controlling street lights on detection of a vehicle where the traffic density is low and lighting on and off-street lamps based on lighting levels in the environment are great exaFor this project, I used the ultrasonic sensor which acted as a counter and also to measure the distance of an approaching vehicle to a given street lamp.

Secondly, I used a light dependent resistor which would determine when the light should be on or off depending on natural light intensity in the environment. It also acted as a health sensor, to check the status of a street lamp if it's functional or not.mples of it. The main aspect of this project is to provide automation of the lighting system to save power.

Supplies

A brief description of the components are as follows:

Light Dependent Resistors (LDR) sensors

Light Dependent Resistor as the name suggest the resistance is dependent upon the light incident on it. The light dependent resistor resistance changes with the intensity of light, with an increase in light intensity the resistance offered by the sensor decreases and with the decrease in light intensity the resistance offered by the sensor increases. Hence it acts as a variable resistor with a change in light intensity.

Light-dependent resistor has a low cost and simple structure. The resistor is frequently used as light sensors. In this project, it will be used to determine the presence or absence of natural light within the given environment.

o Arduino Uno

Arduino is an open-source physical platform based on microcontroller board having the ATmega32 series controllers and Integrated Development Environment for writing and uploading codes to the microcontroller. It has input and output pins for interaction with the outside world such as with sensors, switches, motors and so on. To be precise it has 14 digital input/output pins (of which 6 can be used as PWM outputs), 6 analog inputs, a 16 MHz quartz crystal, a USB connection, a power jack, an ICSP header, and a reset button. It contains everything needed to support the microcontroller. It can take supply through USB or we can power it with an AC-to-DC adapter or a battery Arduino acts as the processing module of the system. It takes input from the LDR, process the data and gives the output to LEDs directly or through a relay and a transistor mechanism.

Communication between the microcontroller and the controlling device is serial. Serial interfaces stream their data, one single bit at a time. These interfaces can operate on as little as one wire, usually never more than four.

Baud rate is also used in the microcontroller. The baud rate specifies how fast data is sent over a serial line. It's usually expressed in units of bits-per-second (bps). If you invert the baud rate, you can find out just how long it takes to transmit a single bit. This value determines how long the transmitter holds a serial line high/low or at what period the receiving device samples its line. The higher a baud rate goes, the faster the data is sent/received, but there are limits to how fast data can be transferred. The Microcontroller limit is set at 115200 - that's fast for most microcontrollers. Get too high, and you'll begin to see errors on the receiving end, as clocks and sampling periods just can't keep up.

· LEDs

A light-emitting diode (LED) is a PN junction diode, which emits light when activated. When we apply voltage across its leads, electrons are able to recombine with holes within the LED, releasing the energy in the form of photons which gives the light. Hence, it is a two-lead semiconductor light source Light emitting diodes represent our lighting system and the amount of light emitted by it is directly related to the amount of light in the environment that is when outside light is less than the light given by LEDs is more and visa-versa.

· Ultrasonic sensor

An ultrasonic sensor is an instrument that measures the distance to an object using ultrasonic sound waves.An ultrasonic sensor uses a transducer to send and receive ultrasonic pulses that relay back information about an object’s proximity. High-frequency sound waves reflect from boundaries to produce distinct echo patterns. In this project the ultrasonic sensor will be used as a counter to count the number of vehicles passing through a given road.

· WIFI module

The ESP8266 Wi-Fi module is a complete Wi-Fi network where you can easily connect as a serving Wi-Fi adapter, wireless internet access interface to any microcontroller­ based design on its simple connectivity through Serial Communication or UART interface. The Wi-Fi will be used to establish an effective communication link between the controller and PC for bidirectional data transfer.

The module will be able to collect the data such as light dependent resistance values and number of vehicles accessing a specific road and thereby providing information on their status. The system will also be able to monitor the lighting control status.

These components are meant to work together to relay the proposed functions of the project and also send data from the microcontroller to the administrator.