Smart City - Smart Parking

                             “ Decade of the Urbanization “ – World’s growing love affair with cities shows robust growth of urban population which is at rate of 1.8% per every year in this decade. With estimation of 70% of world’s population live in cities by 2050, managing urban areas has become one of the most important development challenges of the 21st century. As a result, countries will face numerous challenges in meeting the needs of their growing urban populations, including for transportation, infrastructure, housing, energy and employment, as well as for basic services such as education and health care. One of such problem is traffic congestion and parking in cities. According to a survey about 30% of traffic congestion's in cities during peak times is because of drivers searching parking areas. To address this problem this project proposes a  well planned parking system that would save time, fuel  and helps us to reshape our cities and put them in path of “Smart Cities”. This smart parking system allows us to check the parking availability remotely using a web application.

Devices : Location sensors and Distance sensors to identify the location spots




     

Setting up Raspberry Pi device -

Installing Raspbian OS:

Things required:

• Raspberry Pi device
• HDMI monitor 
• USB Keyboard and Mouse
• 8GB Sd card with NOOBS installed ( else download it from http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/ , extract it and copy it to SD card)

OS Installation:

           Connect your R-Pi devvice to HDMI tv using cable and supply power to the device. you will be displayed with list of OS that are available and that ready to install. Change your country and keyboard layout before you install Raspbian. Now select Raspbian as OS type and click on Install button which is on your top left. Once the installation has taken place it will prompt you to change few settings. Change your password and locality and click finish. Please change default start upp screen (option 2) so that need not provide startx command every time you login to your PI. Now your OS installation is done.

Connecting to WIFI:

Things Required:

• Wifi dongle

Go to Preferences in Start and select WIFI configuration. Then click on scan button which brings list you  wifi connections that available. Double click on your wifi network and provide passcode in PSK and press connect.

Installing VNC server:

  Make sure  you are connected to network through Wifi or ethernet.

Log in to your Pi and install the Tight VNC Package, before installing make sure you get updates.

Follow below commands:

To update packages:

     Command : $ sudo apt-get updates 

To install VNC server :

   

   Command :  $ sudo apt-get install tightvncserver

Start VNC server using below command:

   Command : tightvncserver :1

Which will prompt you set a password and optional view only password. 

Now Install Tight VNC on your desktop from the link below:

http://www.tightvnc.com/download.php

Now after installation use your R-PI IP address followed by :: and then by your port number. To get IP address type ifconfig in your xterminal.  

So it should look like below. 

<Your Pi IP> ::590* or Your hostname::590*

 e.g.: 192.168.1.129::5901

* here tells you display number. So you should give display number as your port number.

Now try to connect from your client machine providing above mentioned details, which will ask you to provide password. Now you should be able to see your desktop.  

To run VNC server at start-up( boot ) ;

This is to run VNC server during boot process itself, so that we can connect to R-PI device with our laptop itself using VNC client.  

Below link would be help full to run VNC server during boot itself.

http://elinux.org/RPi_VNC_Server

Internet of Things:

Imagine everything in the world connected with Internet and assume every object communicates with /reads other objects and reacts to them on its own . For say, your car communicates with cars those are already at location that you wish to travel and get availability of parking slots, Your refrigerators checks out of stock items and communicate to you, A sensor that saves lives by instant reporting about your health, Window shades on your house automatically comes down when sun sets and devices looking after you and come up with a plan that suits you for that days schedule. I would say it would be an automated world and this is Internet of things.  

With estimated 30 billion devices will be connected by internet by the year 2020, there is lot scope for this subject across all domains such as Agriculture,  Smart cities, logistics, Industries  and Health etc.

I'm here posting all my work and projects to complete my course "CSC9010 - Internet of Things" at Villanova University under guidance of Professor Paul Schragger.