ECE 110/120 Honors Lab Section : Electronic Centeral Enhanced (ECE) Street Light

Introduction

1. Statement of Purpose

   1. Our project is a modern take on the classic street light. Currently, street lights remain on during all hours of dark. This is an unnecessary waste of energy, and we plan to design a simple module to convert regular street lamps into modern street lamps. The module will be able to detect the ambient light around the street lamp in order to tell if it is night or day. Furthermore, it will use existing pressure sensors on the ground at intersections to turn on the street lamps in the corresponding block that the car is going to drive towards. A diagram of the concept is included below. 
      
      In this example, the car is located on the right lane of the bottom road, and has depressed the pressure sensor situated there. Consequently, the lights on the bottom, right, and center road are all lit up.
      
      
      

2. Background Research

   1. Newest Streetlight: GE LED Streetlight (ERL1)
   2. Amount of time spent in night time around Springfield, Illinois
   
   
   
   

   1. Cost of Electricity: Average:  $0.049463 / kWh

Design Details

Since building an actual street corner with all four roads would be cumbersome, we will model the logic and lights with an LED cube. Simply put, a car sits on the right most lane, then the center column and the rightmost column will light up, simulating that the road to the right and to the center have been lit up. By extension, a car sitting on the left most lane would light up the left most column of the cube. Finally, if there is a car on both the left and the right lane, then all the lights would be lit up.

1. Block Diagram

1. Circuit Schematic

   
   
   With this circuit schematic, we recognized early on that we would need to use states in order to achieve the implementation we desired. Since the lights on each of the corresponding roads would need to stay on long past the last car's departure, we needed to use registers to hold the value of the car's lane until another car arrived. 

1. Logic Truth Table

Parts

Diffused RED LED (x125)

Photo-Resistor 

Red Board Arduino

Tactile Button - SMD (6mm) (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12992) (x2)

QUAD 2-Input AND Gate (74f08)

Possible Challenges

Due to the fast pace of cars, we believe it would be best to implement our design in residential areas where traffic is low during the night time, and the speed limit for vehicles is around 25mph. 

Another challenge would be finding a way to efficiently light up all the LEDs we need without sacrificing too much brightness per LED

Future Plans

Due to time constraints and debugging issues over the last semester, we were not able to fully realize our design. While our design does a great job for the first car to arrive at the intersection, we currently have neither the logic set up for when to turn off the light, nor the logic required to reset the lights once one car has passed so that the next car can use the system again. To do this, we would have the four adjacent intersections pressure sensors be inputs to the current intersection. When one intersection is both lit up and has a car on the pressure sensor at the adjacent intersection, the lights that are lighting that road will begin to count down 5 seconds after the RYG light at the adjacent intersection has turned green. This would be the full implementation of the idea, and the network would span out until it covered an entire city. 

References

Power consumption calculator: http://intelilight.eu/financial-and-business-case/street-lighting-savings-calculator/

GE LED Streetlight (ERL1) Datasheet: http://www.gelighting.com/LightingWeb/na/images/OLP3093-GE-LED-Evolve-Low-Wattage-Street-Light-ERL1-Data-Sheet_tcm201-91959.pdf

Urbana Illinois Electricity Costs: https://power2switch.com/IL/Urbana/