ϱniʞniʜT bɿɒwɿoꟻ

Inspiration

Light pollution is a growing problem in urban environments, even starting to affect remote rural locations. The constant presence of light has had a measurable impact on wildlife habits; and the new LED lights being implemented have an excessive amount of blue light which have been shown to negatively impact mammalian circadian rhythms. As well, the City of Calgary spends a non-trivial amount of money on maintenance of said lights as well as the electricity to keep them powered on. This project would reduce light pollution, reduce short term (electrical) and long term (maintenance) costs associated with lighting the city.

What it does

We developed a solution for light posts that uses a combination of ultrasonic sensors and Passive Infra-red motion sensors to allow the streetlights to turn on and off as movement is detected in close location to the light. This data is then logged in a central database to allow for future analysis and to turn neighboring lights on and off.

How we built it

We used sensors to build a proof of concept that allowed us to control LED's when they detected movement. This proof of concept turns various LED's on when the sensors detect movement, and turns them off after a few seconds. This would be easily extended to a variable resistance relay to allow for control of the power running the street lights to allow for dimming, or disabling, of the lights.

Challenges we ran into

The ultrasonic sensors were extremely noisy in terms of feedback. Lots of new technology and software for everyone on the team to learn. The sensors required 5V for best performance, which required using a raspberry pi connected to an arduino which was connected to the sensors to turn the lights off and on.