The idea is to make the street lights smart. Although Smart light is not a new concept, but our suggested idea could lead to greater savings in energy. The objective is to minimize the use of electricity that gets consumed in lighting up of street lights. In daily lives, we all might have observed atleast once, that the lights remain turned on even in day time. And this leads to unnecessary wastage of the resources. Also at night i.e. in between 1 - 4 a.m. , the roads are mostly silent, therefore turning on lights esp when no one is using it simply states the wastage of resources.
What we dream to make is an iot project, that does all the work of switching lights on/off without any human intervention. Now we have created 3 possibilities on which our iot device will work.
When there is enough of sunlight, there is no need of street light.
Night, Low light or cloudy conditions: In this case a threshold value will be set and if the available light is less than the threshold value, the street lights turn on. We will be also controlling the brightness according to the requirements and this will save a lot of energy.
In night when the road is silent: When there is no vehicle on road and not even a pedestrian, it is useless to keep the lights on.
This uses a basic LDR sensor that can be connected to arduino along with a bit of coding and the lights can be controlled accordingly.
When there is low light or cloudy conditions, the amount of voltage can be varied according to the values generated by LDR sensor. The variation in voltage results in variation of brightness. At night the lights will glow bright.
For this, we can to use a motion detector sensor. When this sensor detects no motion, the street lights will remain switched off. There will be set of 2 motion sensors, that will control the street lights of a particular road. When a pedestrian/vehicle comes in range of 1st motion sensor, the street lights of that road lights up and remain as such till he reaches the other motion sensor that triggers the light to again switch off.
The data that is constantly being generated by the sensors can be uploaded in real time to the cloud and the consumption of electricity can be monitored.
arduino uno r3, LDR sensor, PIR sensor, esp8266 module, cloud based platform, A model of street light,