[Marios Christoforou] recently undertook a Computer Engineering degree at the University of Cypress. His final year project involved implementing a solar-powered device to count vehicular traffic, while logging results to the cloud.
The project is built around a Raspberry Pi 5, specifically the version with 4 GB of RAM. It runs Raspberry Pi OS and is equipped with a basic webcam with 720p video output. The single-board computer runs off a 12 volt lead acid battery, which is charged via a 100 W solar panel hooked up to a basic charger module. Identifying vehicles in traffic is achieved with the YOLOv8 Nano machine vision model, which outputs bounding boxes around cars, trucks, buses, and motorcycles captured in the webcam feed. Software algorithms are used to ensure vehicles are only counted once as they pass through the camera’s field of view.
There’s plenty of detail on how the project was refined to meet initial goals. To make the most of the solar power available, [Marios] optimized the setup with an eye to performance and low power draw. To that end, the Raspberry Pi had Bluetooth, the PCIe slot, audio, and HDMI ports all disabled, while the CPU and GPU were both under-clocked for good measure. Software tweaks were also used, like running headless and dropping unimportant parts of the video frame for more efficiency.
We’ve featured other homebrew traffic monitors before. These days, though, it’s Flock cameras that seem to be making all the headlines in this area.
