Smart Car Parking System Using Arduino UNO

Ever faced problems parking your car at the basement parking slots?

Well, every time I guess. 

With the growing economy and urbanization, a lot of malls, multiplexes and shopping malls have come up. Parking always seems to be a major issue at such places. Commutators usually waste a lot of time and consume fuels while searching for empty parking space. Finding a parking space during weekends or major events always seems to be challenging. In order to combat this problem there is a need of an automated system which indicates the number of vacant slots in a parking station helping drivers to park their cars accordingly.

This smart car parking system indicates the vacant and occupied slots and gives the exact number of slots that are vacant in a parking station.

HOW IT WORKS?

In this project, 2 IR sensors are used to detect the presence of vehicle in a particular parking slot. The IR sensors are connected to the Arduino board. The sensors receive a signal if any object is detected and send this data to arduino, where this data is compared to a threshold value and accordingly power is supplied to the desired LED. The sensors are connected to pins A0 and A1 of the arduino and LEDs are connected to the digital input/output pins D2,D3,D4,D5. If any car is parked, say in slot 1, the sensor placed there would detect the presence of the car and would send signal to arduino. Arduino would receive this signal and glow the respective LED. A code is written and uploaded to arduino for glowing a particular LED when signals from sensors are received. For example, red LED glows when the slot is occupied and green LED glows if the slot is vacant. Moreover, to display the exact number of vacancies inside the parking station, a LCD display is connected at the entrance of the parking station. A LCD has 14 pins.The pin VSS of LCD is connected to ground, VDD to 5v supply,R/W pin to ground, V0 pin to the potentiometer(for adjusting the brightness), RS to digital pin 12 of arduino, enable pin to pin 11 of arduino and pin d4-d7 connected to digital pins D6-D9 of arduino. A code is written for displaying a particular message on LCD when arduino receives signals from sensors. For example, if a car is parked in one slot and the other slot is empty (assuming the parking station has only 2 slots), then a message " VACANCY 1" would be displayed on LCD helping people waiting outside the parking station to get the status of the vacancies inside.

I hope you found it interesting. This is my first post and a first attempt to share a project review with its brief description and working. You can give your suggestions and views.