Open-Park

Inspiration

Our group members consistently encounter issues with parking during the school week, so we decided to make a service that helps everyone find available parking spots in real time. We also decided to use cheap components, to show that the buy in cost is low for UC Davis and other campuses to integrate a parking service with their home website

What it does

A camera is integrated with a microcontroller, which takes images every few seconds. That data is sent as a base64 encoded file to a firebase realtime database. Then, another computer can pull from that database and perform image processing techniques to determine which parking spots are filled, and which are empty. That is then mapped to a grid representing the parking spots, which is then displayed on a website for users of the parking lot to see.

How we built it

Manoj-- Sayan-- Asad-- Designed the image capture and serial - base64 encoded format to be sent to the database Dhilan-- Set up the firebase database and designed the sending and receiving functionality for the microcontroller and computer to transfer images over the internet.

Challenges we ran into

We also wanted to do license plate detection functionality, which could check with a database of registered cars to see if they paid for parking that day. We ran out of time and could not implement the hardware correctly to get the detection working.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We learned how to convert between multiple data types and manipulate them over a server, which is something we have never done before. We also weaved multiple programming languages and libraries together to make a functional system. Our total cost for this project was only 15 dollars for the camera and microcontroller, as everything else was just a free online service. We also used some LEDs for interfacing, but those are pretty cheap and not required for every camera that is installed.