Arduino Parking Lot Attendant

Here’s an automatic parking gate for toy cars. There’s no need to press a button, the electronics detect the presence of a vehicle on either side of the gate, raising it after verifying that the lot is not already full. It’s the same idea as counting how many people enter a room in order to switch the lights but the hardware is just a bit different.

The system is controlled by a pair of sensors in the paper which serves as the parking lot. There are three sheets of heavy stock, the top and bottom both have aluminum foil on them, with the center layer  as a separator. There are holes cut in the separator where the hash marks are seen above. By adding a little pressure to the car when you drive it up to the gate this completes a circuit instructing the Arduino that there’s a vehicle in position.

You can see a demonstration, as well as the guts of the build, in two videos after the break.

[via Reddit via Freetronics]

25 thoughts on “Arduino Parking Lot Attendant

    1. Given the price of RFID stuff these days, that’s actually feasible.

      The model train nerds do that to ID rolling stock on their setups.

      If you grab just the last byte from the code you can get enough codes to avoid clashes and make coding easier.

      (Why is another story, and the answer of course is ‘why not?’)

  1. Too bad you left out the bit that slashes your tires when you try and sneak in through the out gate! (You could’ve put in a little shocker if you really didn’t want a row of pins to slash your fingers)… Just saying…

      1. Then that’s clearly a nice advantage to being poor. Me in my ancient gas guzzling steel beast has no trouble turning those lights. :)

        I lied, I drive a Taco.

        I’m still poor though. :D

  2. I like how some of the cars had to make 3 point turns instead of just pulling impossible low speed drifts.

    a small bit of refining and finishing, and I could see this as a marketable toy. maybe even a fancy lego set as an intro to the mindstorms series.

    –or scale it up and manage your own parking lot somewhere.

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