Intelligent streetlight monitoring system using LoRa technology

Date
2022-05
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Abstract
Given recent crimes that have come up due to poor street lighting systems in Ghana, this project implements a functional Internet of Things (IoT) system to improve the existing means of maintaining streetlights. The system is designed as a retrofit to be attached to an existing streetlight system. The system can report data on recorded environmental factors, the state of the streetlight lamp, display the positions of streetlights on a map, and a graph on the energy being consumed. In Ghana, although streetlights exist, the overall distribution and maintenance across communities are poor, affecting the activities of motorists and pedestrians. Hence, there is a need for an improvement in the system. The Long Range (LoRa) communication technology which is a wireless protocol with low power consumption and secure communication, was used in this project. Some key findings in this paper were that the transmission time of LoRa is barely affected by distance, and to obtain longer ranges with LoRa, the device should be positioned at higher heights above sea level. This report describes the hardware and software design and implementation and confirmation tests of the system. Data from sensors are collected at a streetlight and sent to a gateway over LoRa.Wi-Fi at the Gateway sends the data packets to a database using HTTP requests, and a dashboard built over PHP, CSS, HTML, JS, and JSON displays a graphical representation of the data in the database. In conclusion, LoRa was able to transmit all data through serial commands. The goal of attaching smartness to the streetlight was obtained, and monitoring and analysis of data were done on a dashboard.
Description
Capstone Project submitted to the Department of Engineering, Ashesi University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering, May 2022
Keywords
monitoring system, faulty streetlights
Citation
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