Photo voltaic Powered Site visitors Monitoring | Hackaday

[Marios Christoforou] lately undertook a Computer Engineering diploma on the University of Cyprus. His last yr undertaking concerned implementing a solar-powered device to count vehicular traffic, whereas logging outcomes to the cloud.

The undertaking is constructed round a Raspberry Pi 5, particularly the model with 4 GB of RAM. It runs Raspberry Pi OS and is provided with a fundamental webcam with 720p video output. The single-board laptop runs off a 12 volt lead acid battery, which is charged by way of a 100 W photo voltaic panel hooked as much as a fundamental charger module. Identifying automobiles in site visitors is achieved with the YOLOv8 Nano machine imaginative and prescient mannequin, which outputs bounding packing containers round vehicles, vans, buses, and bikes captured within the webcam feed. Software algorithms are used to make sure automobiles are solely counted as soon as as they move via the digital camera’s area of view.

There’s loads of element on how the undertaking was refined to fulfill preliminary targets. To benefit from the solar energy obtainable, [Marios] optimized the setup with a watch to efficiency and low energy draw. To that finish, the Raspberry Pi had Bluetooth, the PCIe slot, audio, and HDMI ports all disabled, whereas the CPU and GPU have been each under-clocked for good measure. Software tweaks have been additionally used, like working headless and dropping unimportant components of the video body for extra effectivity.

We’ve featured other homebrew traffic monitors before. These days, although, it’s Flock cameras that seem to be making all the headlines in this area.