A prototype for Bicycle Parking System with IoT application
This is the idea of Konel Inc. members who are living in one of the most crowded city over the world — TOKYO. The problem of this city is how people find a good place to park their bicycles with a very limited spaces around the train stations where Tokyo citizens using the public transport for their daily journey to the schools or workplaces. As the matter of fact from my Japanese friends, it is costly and time-consumed for submitting a place of park to the Council of the city.
And the houses of the residents who living around the train station having free spaces with no intention for any service! Wow, it’s a waste, especially spaces in one of cities with the highest living cost as Tokyo. Why we don’t combine the demand of parking with the potential money-earning service around the stations.
IoT Technology can solve the problem of above idea. Nowadays, we can see this cloud-based technology has improved the modern life as its applications in Smart Home, Smart City, Smart Agriculture etc. We would like to conduct the research for making the prototype of the smart parking system for bicycle to find out if IoT can be the good solution for the above problem or not. Therefore, one group of engineering students in Can Tho university (CTU) has taken the prototype project under the support and advice of Konel Inc.
First of all, we need something to “keep” the bicycles stand still and “wait” for their owner doing some stuff. It’s the standing frame for locking the front wheel.
We also conducted an investigation for the sizes of wheels those of the popular bicycles in Vietnam. This provides good data for designing the sliding mechanism of lock for most of model of wheels.
And here we are, the first prototype for the frame.
Now the electronic part:
We used cheap and easy-to-find components for the circuit:
- Arduino Uno R3
- ESP8266 Node MCU
- DC motor driver L298N
- Solar sensor
- Limit switches
- DC motor
- LEDs
Those electronic items are very popular in the market and the total cost for the whole control circuit is under 100$. The Arduino Uno board has responsibility for receiving the signal from the switches, sensors and sending serial command to the ESP8266 for uploading value and status of the system to the cloud. The ESP board also receives the command from the server for controlling the lock (lock and unlock). The solar sensor will sense the position of the wheel to feedback the distance between the lock and the wheel, which the Arduino board can control the sliding mechanism to locate the best position for the lock.
There is also a portable lock which integrated to one ESP8266 V12 board and a RFID sensor for unlocking when the Internet connection has problem.
Once the wheel and the lock at the right position, the server will receive the signal of being ready for locking. The lock command can be issued by a click of the user on the interface of web-app. It works quite well until now for simple lock under the control from the Internet. We still need to develop the function for charging of time for parking. That’s it, it’s simple and effective but needed to be optimized and developed for a practical application.
Credit: Seppy — P.L Xuan Dat — P. Lam Thuy
