Smart Street Light

With the system that is in place now, when a streetlight loses power, the only way the utility provider knows that a streetlight is out is when a customer calls to report the outage.

By using our system and retrofitting old streetlights with our device, utility companies will be instantly notified if a streetlight loses power or its bulb burns out. This will lead to lower maintenance costs because there will be no reason to send out a crew to confirm a streetlight's status.

The streetlights will communicate through a wireless XBee network connecting each streetlight in a mesh network, sending the status of every streetlight in the network to a central location. The streetlight statuses will then be visually displayed on a user interface at the central location.

XBee Series 1:
Our team has designed a model of the Smart Streetlight network using three XBee wireless modules connected to three streelights allowing them to communicate. The XBee was chosen by the team because of it is good for point-to-point, multipoint and is convertible to a mesh network. XBee devices can automatically send the streetlight statuses on a set interval of time.

Raspberry Pi 2:
The Raspberry Pi 2 was chosen because of its ability to connect to a LCD screen through HDMI and because it can easily run a Linux based OS to run our User Interface software we created. The Raspberry Pi also has GPIO pins, making it easy to connect an XBee device to it to receive signals from the mesh network. Devices such as keyboards and Wi-Fi dongles can be easily connected to the Pi via USB ports.