Park My Ride

The goal of the project is to create a proof of concept system for a Smart City service that will communicate parking availability to our mobile app users. The scope of our project is to develop a system that will allow Park My Ride mobile app users to view and monitor (in real time) available parking on Lakeside and Fifth Street next to The Innovation Den in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

=Problem Definition=

Background
Finding street side parking in downtown Coeur d’Alene is a challenge, particularly around The Innovation Den. For the Park My Ride project, we will be mounting two cameras on the roof of the Innovation Den, one facing Lakeside Avenue and the other facing 5th street. These cameras will periodically take photos of the two streets and send them to our server, where we will utilize photo analyzing software to determine the extents of available parking spaces within the designated parking zones of each street. This information will be sent to all Park My Ride mobile app users using push notifications. The mobile app will visually display the amount and relative location of available parking spaces on each street, and how long it has been since this data was acquired.

Camera Units
The camera units will periodically take photos of their associated parking zones and send these photos to the server for analysis. The camera units will be housed in weatherproof boxes and charged via solar panels. In addition to taking photos with the camera contained in the boxes, we will be tracking the health of the box. We will be monitoring the current and voltage of both the solar panels and the battery. We will also be checking the temperature and humidity within the box. This information will be sent to the server where it can be used for both maintenance and to adjust the rate of photos being taken if necessary for preserving battery life.

Server
The server will be housed within the University of Idaho in the Innovation Den basement. It will receive the photos from the camera boxes as well as all the temperature and humidity inside the box, and health status of the solar panels and batteries. The health of the camera units will be analyzed on the server, and the rate of photos being taken will be adjusted accordingly to preserve the camera units' power. The server will interface with the Google Cloud Vision API for photo analysis, receiving back object localization data for each photo. This data will be further analyzed on the server to determine relative positions of available parking within each serviced parking zone. After available parking data is finalized, this information will be pushed to subscribed mobile app users for real time parking availability updates.

Mobile App
There will be a mobile app available on Android and IOS. A user will be able to see how many parking spots are available on each of the two streets adjacent to The Innovation Den (Lakeside Avenue and Fifth Street) and how long it has been since the last analyzed photo was taken so that the user knows the freshness of the data.

=Specifications=

=Design Considerations=

=Project Learning=

=Final Design=

=Validation=

=Team Members=

=Additional Documentation=

Project Schedule



Meeting Minutes



Presentations



Client Interview