A project for coding for community that can detect Street Lamp outages and relay the information back to the municipality.

1. Street Lamp Detection
Realtime Detection of Streetlamp Outages
by Aruj Jain and Gustav Hansen

2. What’s the need?
Developed for Perth Amboy
The city has a problem concerning street light outages. When a street light bulb
goes out, the city risks the safety of our citizens due to impaired lighting and
cost the municipality a lot of time and money in the interim until the problem
bulb is found and fixed.

3. Our solution
Our solution is to create a network
of low cost Raspberry Pis that
communicate in a mesh network,
equipped with light sensors to
detect light outages and
communicate the exact street
lamp to the municipality.

4. How it works
❖This works by creating a mesh network where each of the Pis communicate
directly to each other, eliminating the need for Internet. Only one Pi must
be connected to the Internet for all of them to be connected
❖Custom software written along with a circuit designed allows the Pi to
check light levels during the night and send push notifications right to a
phone when an outage is detected, notifying exactly which lamp went out.
❖Only a single app already in the app store needs to be installed on a phone
to receive notifications and installation of Pis are as easy as possible.
❖Comprehensive documentation is available on Github:
https://github.com/kusti8/cfc
Credit: http://www.specmeters.com/assets/1/7/MainFCKEditorDimension/Mesh.jpg

5. Impact
Credit: http://warisanlighting.com/wp-content/uploads/parser/street-lamps-6.jpgCredit: http://cdn1.alphr.com/sites/alphr/files/6/14/raspberry_pi_b_2_0_0.jpg
Short term Long term
➢ Saves money used to patrol street lamp
outages
➢ Prevents accidents in low light situations
➢ Allows for fast response to fix lamps
➢ Improved infrastructure and better bond
between community and government
➢ Overall safety in community will be
improved
➢ Other applications

6. Originality
❖ Uses original programs to check and notify a phone of light
outages during specific times of the day
❖ Custom changes made to the OS to make it less susceptible to
power outages.
❖ Circuit design modified from ideas and advice to suit project
❖ Utilizes a self-modified version of HSMM-Pi
(https://github.com/urlgrey/hsmm-pi) which is a large
frontend for olsrd (http://www.olsr.org) , a routing program

7. Scalability
❖ Each Pi requires minimal effort, only 5-10 steps in total
to deploy and new Pis can be introduced simply by
configuring them. Add new Pis anytime.
❖ Any municipality with street lamps can benefit from this
since the Pis automatically create a mesh network
throughout the city.
❖ Network of small microcontrollers that can be scaled out
throughout an entire city

8. Usability
❖ Very easy to use and deal with
❖ Doesn’t require long term maintenance
❖ Only needs initial setup to make accounts for phone
notification
❖ Clear instructions written on Github on how to add new Pis
into the network, no outside help needed
❖ New phones can be added to notification platform by getting
the app and logging in

9. Additional Links
All documentation including step by step instructions at
the github:
https://github.com/kusti8/cfc