Infopulse Wins Best Business Case Award at IoT Hackathon

About Garage48 Hackathon 2016

Garage48 IoT Hackathon 2016 was hosted in Dnipro, Ukraine on October 28-30, 2016. Organized by Garage48 and Estonian Development Cooperation with the support of Intel, ARTKB, and other Ukrainian and international companies, the hackathon was largely focused on Internet of Things and innovative technologies. In total, 16 teams joined the hackathon. Mentored by the industry experts, the hackathon participants had two full days to design their ideas and produce working prototypes from the ground up.

In Search of Parking: IoT vs Urbanization

Infopulse’s project idea was to create an IoT solution and app that would help drivers to quickly locate and book vacant parking slots.

The rise of urbanization and increased density of population in certain regions has led to many negative effects, such as traffic congestion, deterioration of air pollution and negative health risks. Nowadays, it’s really hard to find a vacant parking slot in overcrowded cities. While searching for a parking slot, circling around could take up to 20 minutes. To think globally, astonishing amounts of time, fuel and money are wasted.

With the help of our solution, we aim to transform municipal parking places by equipping them with small, affordable and effective sensors.

MyParking Online Service Detailed

FRONTEND. The solution will be available as a mobile or web app for the handheld devices. With its help, a car driver will be able to easily locate a free parking nearby in the overcrowded cities on a map. A user can review the number of available slots, the price of parking per hour, parking schedule, its location, and distance to parking. The information updates immediately. To book a parking slot in advance, a user needs to pay online.

The app will then give you driving directions to the parking on a map. Upon parking a car, the app will save your parking location on the map and will switch to pedestrian mode, allowing to get directions back to the car from within the app. It will be possible to extend parking session as well.

BACKEND. Sensors detect a car at parking place and send information to a server whether the parking slot is busy or not. We are using really small and affordable sensors and microcontrollers, which can be easily installed under the road surface. With the total cost of just $10, the sensor device can work wirelessly over 5 years on a single battery! To save the battery, an intellectual sleep mode is developed and Zigbee interface is embedded into the sensor. A pressure hull will protect the sensor, supporting the weight of a car.

First Prototype and Further Steps

In just 48 hours, Infopulse team developed and presented a working parking sensor, which sends a signal to the MyParking server. We emulated a parking place on Google maps with “busy”/”not busy” status indication via a web application. Infopulse team received the “Best Business Case” special award for this project.

Are you interested in our IoT solution? Do you have suggestions or ideas? Let’s talk!

Best Moments from Garage48 IoT Hackathon 2016 [PHOTO GALLERY]