Traffic Camera Countermeasure

October 23, 2012 by Mike Szczys 212 Comments

Don’t get us wrong, we drive very carefully as it’s the most dangerous thing we do on a regular basis. But even a careful driver can get caught by bad traffic and a red light camera. These are devices that monitor intersections. If you get caught in the middle when the light goes red they take a picture and you get a ticket in the mail. Well, that’s the way it used to be. This traffic camera countermeasure puts it to an end. As you can see, the noPhoto uses a flash of its own to overexpose traffic camera images.

The image above shows the prototype. The foil is reflecting a flash on either side onto the license plate using a flash sensor which acts as the trigger. According to the demo video after the break, the system can even defeat the pre-flash, and dual-photo types of cameras.

There are pretty tight restrictions on using lights on your vehicles (colors, placement, etc.). We wonder if this passes muster?

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Using GPS To Stay Aware Of Red Light Cameras

April 12, 2012 by Mike Nathan 62 Comments

red-light-camera-alerter

Depending on how you view them, red light cameras are a great way to get people to drive carefully, or an utter nuisance. We agree with the latter opinion, as does [Dave], so he built a handy little device that alerts him when he’s about to approach one of these intersections.

His Red Light Camera Alerter is based around an Atmega 328P sporting the Arduino bootloader. The micro obtains GPS coordinates while [Dave] is driving, comparing his current location with a table of all known red light intersections in the area. As he nears a red light camera, the status LED changes colors from blue to yellow to red as he gets closer, making it easy to keep aware of his situation. He also included an Adafruit OLED display in his device, which relays his speed, GPS coordinates, heading, and actual distance from the red light in real time.

While [Dave] admits that he doesn’t really have a need for the alerter as there are only a couple located in his immediate vicinity, he says it was a fun and easy way to get some experience with using GPS sensors in his projects. He doesn’t have any video of it in action, but you can find the code he uses to drive the alerter on his blog.