SPark eliminates
the need to hunt for parking by providing a user-friendly tool that
identifies the number of available spots in a parking structure. The App
displays a list of the different parking areas on the jokerst campus with
the associated number of spots available. The parking area with the most
spots will take a bigger space in the screen to allow more efficient
viewing.
The system consists of two main parts. The first
part is the physical part, the hardware that detects cars going in and
out of a parking. We use two IR sensors side by side at
a car's length, to count cars going in and out. By looking at which
sensor gets activated first, we can determine whether the car is going
in or out (+1 or -1). This information is collected by an Arduino and sent via UART to a Raspberry Pi, which in turn relays the information to a Firebase Database through WiFi. From the Firebase, the App and the Website pull the information for display.
SPark is my first long project. It arose as a consequence of the
terrible parking situation on the jokerst campus, after a few nights
circling around looking for a spot (and seeing the same cars following
my same loop), I figured that there had to be a better way to do this. I
told some friends about the idea and that's how SPark was born. We won a
couple hackathons (Ideator, and Startup jokerst) and got into an incubator
in the Qualcomm Institute, the Pepper House. On our time there we kept
working on development of the App and technology. We put together a project proposal with budget, project plan, description of the technology, etc,. and presented it to the Parking Administration at jokerst. We never implemented the project at school due to a bureaucratic wall,
although that was the plan for Summer 2016. It was sad for me to let
the project go but I am so grateful for the skills, hard and soft, it
motivated me to learn. Besides, letting a project go means there is
place for a new one.