Design of a low-cost streetlight monitoring system using LoRa

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, April 2019Streetlights are public goods that beautify cities, ensure safety for road users and security for city neighborhoods. A delay in streetlight maintenance jeopardizes the safety and security of many. Also, when streetlights stay on throughout the day, it wastes power and energy and increases cost. This project presents the design of a low-cost streetlight monitoring system based on LoRa technology. In the design, a Dragino LoraWAN 868MHz (LoRa/GSM) gateway module was used alongside one LoRa shied (transceiver) and an Arduino Uno. The transceiver, Arduino, sensors, and relay formed a LoRa node which was mounted on a streetlight. There is a web application at a remote-control unit with an interface that monitors every node (streetlight) connected to the system. Data about each node was sent to the gateway which uploaded it to the LoRa App server. The LoRa App server decoded the data and made it available through the RESTful API. The data on the LoRa server was accessed via the API using an HTTP integration and was displayed on the web application at the remote monitoring centre. The test LoRa node was able to send accurate information about the state of the streetlight to the LoRa server, and it was accurately displayed at the monitoring unit web interface or dashboard. The node was also able to switch on/off or dim the streetlight at the right times. Key Words: Streetlight monitoring, LoRa, MQTT, remote-control, gateway, IoTAshesi Universit

Streetlight Control System Based on Wireless Communication over DALI Protocol

Public lighting represents a large part of the energy consumption of towns and cities. Efficient management of public lighting can entail significant energy savings. This work presents a smart system for managing public lighting networks based on wireless communication and the DALI protocol. Wireless communication entails significant economic savings, as there is no need to install new wiring and visual impacts and damage to the facades of historical buildings in city centers are avoided. The DALI protocol uses bidirectional communication with the ballast, which allows its status to be controlled and monitored at all times. The novelty of this work is that it tackles all aspects related to the management of public lighting: a standard protocol, DALI, was selected to control the ballast, a wireless node based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard with a DALI interface was designed, a network layer that considers the topology of the lighting network has been developed, and lastly, some user-friendly applications for the control and maintenance of the system by the technical crews of the different towns and cities have been developed

Design and construction of an IoT-based retrofitting unit for streetlight monitoring

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 2021Streetlights in many parts of Ghana are manually controlled or have circuitry designed to switch the light at preset times. While these configurations allow the streetlights to provide lighting at night, there are cases where the lights remain on during the day when not needed. Due to this problem, electrical energy is wasted, and unexpected costs are incurred. In other cases, the streetlights may become faulty without the notice of authorities or technicians, and this problem may affect the safety of road users at night. This project seeks to retrofit intelligence to streetlights to gather insightful data, monitor and control streetlights, and reduce the energy consumption of streetlights in communities. The project explores a low-cost, energy-efficient system that allows streetlights to communicate in a network and transfer data required for remote monitoring and control of streetlights. The monitoring system implements the management of streetlights through a web application interface that enables an administrator to monitor, control and analyze data from any internet-enabled device. The results from the prototype implementation prove that the streetlight monitoring system is about 80.1% energy efficient when the light source is dimmed to about a fifth of its total capacity when the roads are not busy. The results also demonstrate the prototype fulfils the design requirement to monitor malfunctioning lights by alerting the administrator, technician or user to control or visit the streetlight site for servicing remotely. The testing of the various system components demonstrated the feasibility, functionality, and security of the streetlight monitoring system.Ashesi Universit

First experiences with Personal Networks as an enabling platform for service providers

By developing demonstrators and performing small-scale user trials, we found various opportunities and pitfalls for deploying personal networks (PNs) on a commercial basis. The demonstrators were created using as many as possible legacy devices and proven technologies. They deal with applications in the health sector, home services, tourism, and the transportation sector. This paper describes the various architectures and our experiences with the end users and the technology. We conclude that context awareness, service discovery, and content management are very important in PNs and that a personal network provider role is necessary to realize these functions under the assumptions we made. The PNPay Travel demonstrator suggests that PN service platforms provide an opportunity to develop true trans-sector services

Design and Construction of An IOT-Based Retrofitting Unit for Streetlight Monitoring

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.Streetlights in many parts of Ghana are manually controlled or have circuitry designed to switch the light at preset times. While these configurations allow the streetlights to provide lighting at night, there are cases where the lights remain on during the day when not needed. Due to this problem, electrical energy is wasted, and unexpected costs are incurred. In other cases, the streetlights may become faulty without the notice of authorities or technicians, and this problem may affect the safety of road users at night. This project seeks to retrofit intelligence to streetlights to gather insightful data, monitor and control streetlights, and reduce the energy consumption of streetlights in communities. The project explores a low-cost, energy-efficient system that allows streetlights to communicate in a network and transfer data required for remote monitoring and control of streetlights. The monitoring system implements the management of streetlights through a web application interface that enables an administrator to monitor, control and analyze data from any internet-enabled device. The results from the prototype implementation prove that the streetlight monitoring system is about 80.1% energy efficient when the light source is dimmed to about a fifth of its total capacity when the roads are not busy. The results also demonstrate the prototype fulfils the design requirement to monitor malfunctioning lights by alerting the administrator, technician or user to control or visit the streetlight site for servicing remotely. The testing of the various system components demonstrated the feasibility, functionality, and security of the streetlight monitoring system.Ashesi Universit

Intelligent street lighting application for electric power distribution systems the business case for smartgrid technology

Master of ScienceDepartment of Electrical and Computer EngineeringAnil PahwaThis research project builds upon previous work related to intelligent and energy efficient lighting in modern street and outdoor lighting systems. The concept of implementing modern smart grid technologies such as the proposed Street & Outdoor Lighting Intelligent Monitoring System (SOLIMS) is developed. A random sample of photocells from two municipal electric power systems is used to collect data of the actual on/off times of random photocells versus Civil Twilight (sunrise/sunset) times. A business case was developed using the data collected from the observations to support an electric utility company’s implementation of SOLIMS as an alternative to current operations. The goal of the business case is to demonstrate energy and capacity savings, reduced maintenance and operating costs, and lower carbon emissions

Implementation of Energy Saver Circuit using 8051 Microcontroller

In this paper, we have proposed the development of a module based on 8051 microcontroller that allows us to operate a 220V AC lamp with a remote control and regulate the intensity of the lamp as per our needs. The ability to control the intensity of the lamp according to our requirement waives of unwanted wastage of energy thus providing an economic relief and reducing wastage of primary energy sources at this hour of shortage of non-renewable energy sources. Remote control provides an interface to the system that is simple to understand, operate, reliable and durable irrespective of usage and also economical. It adds comfort to our daily life by eliminating unwanted movement to operate the appliances. Remote control facilitates controlling various appliances from a convenient distance. The module is easy to install,convenient to use, energy saving and also cost effective without allowing compensation of efficiency

Rancang Bangun Sistem Lampu Jalan Pintar Nirkabel Berbasis Teknologi Zigbee

Pada penelitian ini dirancang sistem lampu jalan pintar nirkabel berbasis ZigBee (Smart Wireless Street Lighting, SWSL) yang menggunakan sumber tenaga surya dan jaringan listrik Perusahaan Listrik Negara sebagai sumber daya cadangan. SWSL menggunakan sistem embedded dengan kontroler yang dilengkapi sensor cahaya dan gerak untuk mengaktifkan lampu sesuai kondisi lingkungan. SWSL beroperasi secara otomatis sehingga memerlukan sistem monitoring agar diketahui kondisi dan kerusakan lampu berdasarkan data sensor arus dan tegangan. Untuk memudahkan pengawas, terdapat fitur pengendalian jarak jauh dan penghitungan konsumsi energi SWSL. ZigBee merupakan protokol teknologi nirkabel IEEE 802.15.4 yang bersifat terbuka pada frekuensi 2.4 GHz. Aplikasinya memungkinkan untuk proses monitoring dan kontrol, sehingga dapat dikombinasikan dengan sensor dan kontroler. Dari hasil pengujian didapatkan bahwa ZigBee dapat terintegrasi dengan SWSL dan aplikasi monitoring sehingga data dapat dikirimkan sejauh 60 m dengan persentase paket terkirim utuh sebesar 21,4% pada kondisi lingkungan LOS pada RSSI sebesar -89 dBm. Ukuran maksimum paket data untuk sekali transmisi adalah 150 karakter atau 9,6 kilo byte. Pada kondisi NLOS jarak maksimum pengiriman hanya sampai pada 10 meter dengan maksimum RSSI -89 dBm. Kapasitas baterai memiliki daya tahan hingga 3 hari dan kesalahan pada sistem dapat terdeteksi dengan parameter terkirimnya email otomatis dan berubahnya indikator pada aplikasi

Integration of a cellular Internet-of-Things transceiver into 6G test network and evaluation of its performance

Abstract. This thesis focuses on the integration and deployment of an aftermarket cellular IoT transceiver on a 6G/5G test network for the purpose of evaluating the feasibility of such device for monitoring the network performance. The cellular technology employed was NB-IoT paired with a Raspberry Pi device as the microprocessor that collects network telemetry and uses MQTT protocol to provide constant data feed. The system was first tested in a public cellular network through a local service provider and was successfully connected to the network, establishing TCP/IP connections, and allowing internet connectivity. To monitor network information and gathering basic telemetry data, a network monitoring utility was developed. It collected data such as network identifiers, module registration status, band/channel, signal strength and GPS position. This data was then published to a MQTT broker. The Adafruit IO platform served as the MQTT broker, providing an interface to visualize the collected data. Furthermore, the system was configured for and deployed on a 6G/5G test network successfully. The device functionality that was developed and tested in the public network remained intact, enabling continuous monitoring and analysis of network data. Through this study, valuable insights into the integration and deployment of cellular IoT transceivers into cellular networks that employ the latest IoT technology were gained. The findings highlight the feasibility of utilizing such a system for network monitoring and demonstrate the potential for IoT applications in cellular networks