Road Safety (Team Potato)

Inspiration

Running red lights is very dangerous. In the US, a third of drivers admitted to running red lights at least once in the past 30 days. In 2019 alone, 143,000 people were seriously injured in crashes when drivers ran a red light. Our group aims to reduce these types of accidents through introducing the use of automatic traffic bollards.

What it does

We built a program that raises traffic bollards from the ground to act as a barrier to prevent cars from running a red light. There are 2 implementations of this idea, one that is used for a traffic light and another for a pedestrian crossing. In the case of the traffic light, the timing of traffic bollards is tied to the traffic lights. For example, the bollards would be up during a red light and down during a green light. Whereas for our pedestrian crossing, if a pedestrian is present, the bollards will rise for a fixed amount of time before lowering to allow the cars through.

How we built it

The box was first laser cut to size for the casing of the prototype. First, we started off by coming up with a list of physical components we needed to make e.g. rack and pinion gear and box. We spilt the work for 3D modelling and laser cutting. We then came together to start soldering specific electric components. After finishing up our preliminary physical components, we started to work on the software side of our project, to have all the physical components come together to form a cohesive project. We utilized the Arduino IDE and spilt all the different sensors and parts up so that everyone could contribute together. For example, one of us worked on making the rack and pinion gear move with the servo motor while someone else worked to make the traffic lights. We finally sat down together to assemble the code together and do bug testing and fixing together. Afterwards, we went back to the FabLab to make a sturdier final prototype.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into some challenges such as insufficient length of the cables, this resulted in a lot of components disconnecting when we shifted components around thus resulted in a lot of confusion and time wasted for our group as we tried our best to reconnect it. We would have to spend a lot of time getting the right connections. We started taking photos of our connections and making rudimentary schematics so that we understood which cables connected where. It was also our first time using some of these Arduino sensors and modules thus we had to spend time Googling and understanding these sensors and faced a lot of challenges implementing some features. Through persistence and with the help of the internet, we were able to finish our project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team consisted of people with varying experience and skill levels. Our more experienced members did their best to guide us and assigned us work we could handle. It was a very fruitful experience working together and we had a lot of fun trying to do a hardware Arduino project together as it was something a majority of our group had not tried out before.

What we learned

We learnt that making a Smart City is harder than it looks. It takes a lot of careful thought and attention to come up with something that will better our lives as a whole. As a team, we also learnt how to play to each others' strengths. However, more importantly, we learnt to not only rely on our strengths but to share the workload and work together as ultimately this resulted in us having a lot more fun as a team rather than us working individually the whole time.

What's next for Road Safety (Team Potato)

Sleep. Make sure you can't read what's on the LCD.

Built With

• arduino
• cardboard