The DIY LED street light project is yet another easy yet fun to make the project for kids to gain knowledge with DIY. They can learn a thing or two about LDR working and application and coding while making this project. All that is required to make the smart street light is a few components from the evive Starter Kit, other DIY material, and the excitement to learning something interesting!
We&#;ll be writing the code for the project in PictoBlox &#; our Scratch based graphical programming software with advanced hardware interaction capabilities. You can download PictoBlox from HERE.
Ready for some learning by doing? Let&#;s get started!
Let&#;s start by making the base for our LED street light. The base will be used to fix the pole in one place.
The base for our automated street light will be of 10cm * 8cm * 5cm size box.
Take a corrugated sheet of the size 20cm*20cm.
You can use normal cardboard to make the base instead of the corrugated sheet.
It would be easier to first do the markings for box on the sheet. Make a rectangle of 10cm*8cm in the center of our sheet.
Remove the corners so that your sheet looks like a plus sign, similar to the one shown in the below image.
You will notice that the two side edges out the four edges are 1cm bigger, trim those 1 cm out making it equal from all sides.
Keep one of the corners for making the head portion of the street lamp.
Fold along the markings done using a ruler.
And finally, glue them together using hot glue.
With this, your base is completed.
Before we use the LDR, let&#;s first test whether it&#;s working fine or not.
To test the LDR, we are going to use the Pin State Monitor feature of evive as we can see the status of both analog and digital pins directly, which gives it an edge over Arduino.
Connect LDR with evive as given below:
Firstly insert a 10k Ohm resistor in one of the pins of breadboard on evive.
Then insert LDR into the breadboard such that the last leg of the resistor and the first leg of the photoresistor are in the same column.
Then, connect the free leg of the resistor to the GND of evive.
And the free leg of the photoresistor to +5V of evive.
Finally, connect the common column to Analog Pin 0 of evive using a male-to-male jumper cable.
Once the connections are done, switch evive ON.
Select Pin State Monitor from the firmware. As we have connected our LDR to Analog Pin, select analog pin states from the options.
Now observe the value in front of 0. You may see that the value increases when the light is ON and it decreases as soon as the lights are OFF (intensity of the light decreases).
We are going to use straws for the same purpose.
Cut a small portion of the straw to make the arm. Make a slit of approximately 1cm at one end of it. This will help fix our head to the pole.
To make the housing for our LDR and LEDs, we will need a small piece of the corrugated sheet.
Thus, cut out a small U-shaped piece. Now, it&#;s time to bring our main elements into the picture.
Create two holes into the U-shaped corrugated sheet or the lampshade of our Smart Street light using the header of the male jumper cable.
Insert the LDR legs into the given hole so that it sits tightly on the top of our lamp.
Connect the legs of LDR with a jumper cable and pass the wires through the arm.
Now, it&#;s time to add the LEDs of our LED Street Light. Attach the LEDs to the ot
her jumper cable.
Make sure to connect them parallelly.
For making the pole of our smart street light we would use another straw.
Try and use a straw with a large diameter for accommodating our jumper cables.
Take the straw and mark its dimension on to the base by a pencil.
By using a cutter create the small hole for our straw to fit in lightly.
Use hot-glue from the other side to fix the pole.
Now, let&#;s complete the assembly of street light by connecting all the parts.
For connections, we would need to extend the jumper cables.&#;
Now after extending the wires lets pass it through the pole.
Grab them from below the base and connect as per the connections have given with evive.
Finally, glue the arm or the head of the smart street light to the pole using hot glue.
For final connections &#;
Place a 220Ω and 10kΩ resistor on the breadboard.
Connect +ve of led to the one end of 220Ω resistor.
Connect -ve of led to the GND on evive.
Connect one end of LDR to +5v on evive
Connect one end of LDR to 10kΩ resistor
Qianyun supply professional and honest service.
Connect another end of the 10kΩ resistor to GND
Connect A0 on evive with the common of LDR and resistor this would create signal by using a voltage divider circuit.
Write the following script in PictoBlox and upload it to your board:
The program will start executing as soon as evive starts up. The TFT display of evive will show the status of the surrounding light.
The LED connected to Digital Pin 13 should turn ON as soon the reading from the LDR i.e on the Analog Pin 0 is less than 500 and should turn OFF as soon as the value exceeds 500.
With this, your smart street light is ready! Hope you enjoyed making it.
Majunsha went to Oslo of Norway, which was the first city to install citywide automatic street lights. She was surrounded by family and friends to discuss not just her travel experiences but also to know more about smart street lights, Light sensors, LDRs, and IoT.
What is a smart street light? Little Cherry asked Manjusha.
When we are adding the word smart to anything, at least we have some sense of automation, computers and technology in general.
Same is the case with automatic street lights. An automatic street light is the one which adapts to the surroundings be it environment or vehicle movement. According to the surroundings it may turn on, go off, dim down or brighten up.
Take for example a street light that turns on by itself at night or a street light that dims down when there are no people or vehicles on the street. These are automatic or smart street lights.
Multiple sensors can be used to make a smart street light project. Let&#;s know about a few.
LDR: Light Dependent Resistor, which helps detect the presence of light. Read How LDR light sensor works to know more.
IR Sensor: Infrared Sensor, which helps detect an object. Read How IR sensor works to know more.
Ultrasonic sensors: These sensors too, can be used to detect an object.
Motion sensor: To detect the movement.
In this blog, we are going to make an automatic street light using LDR (The light element)
Components required to make an automatic street light
Elements
Accessories
Craft material
You can use any of the following kits to make automatic street light project.
1) Havi Elements &#; DIY Smart Lighting Kit. You will not have to create your own craft. You will get craft ready in the box. Assemble the papers and create your streetlight scene. And then make elements circuits. Suitable for beginners.
2) Havi Elements &#; DIY Robotics Starter Kit. You will make your craft yourself. Suitable for more serious creators, school projects, longer projects.
Once we have all of these, we can start making the circuit first.
Step-1 Make following circuit
Follow the steps provided in the images here and in the video at last to make the setup of your smart street light project.Follow the steps provided in the images here and in the video at last to make the setup of your smart street light project.
Step-2
Step-3 Step-4 Step-5 Adjust the potentiometer of the light element in the middle so that the LDR can detect the adequate light.Adjust the potentiometer of the light element in the middle so that the LDR can detect the adequate light.
Turn the surrounding lights on and off to check your circuit. LEDs should glow up in the dark and will go off in the presence of light.
So you have successfully made the electronics and sensor part of your automatic street light project.
As we are done with the circuit, let&#;s make a beautiful street view to use our smart lights.
Use your creativity along with craft material, team up with family or friends if required and make a street setup that you like. Can make roads, houses, trees and greens.
We have used the street view templates provided in the havi&#;s DIY Smart Lighting Kit. You can make your own if using DIY Robotics Starter Kit.
See, we have LDR in the light element. That detects the presence of light. In the presence of light, it will pass an appropriate signal to the next element which is flip. Now Flip has a characteristic as you know that it flips the input provided by the sensor.
So the Light element has said YES, Flip will convert that to NO and will pass to the LED element. The LED element will understand that I am not supposed to work.
When there is darkness, the Light element will say NO to flip, which the flip will pass to the LED element after converting to YES. So the LED element will believe that I should work and will lighten the LEDs!
And we have lights, the smart street lights!
Following are the key advantages of using smart street light.
While there are several benefits of smart street light there are few disadvantages as well. Let&#;s look at those
As far as our project is concerned, we can Add one IR element and one LED element to the circuit and make it dependent on the vehicle movement. Lights to turn on or brightup while there are people, vehicles and other objects on the road.
At the automatic street light side, further improvements will happen to reduce the cost of production of these kinds of lights. Once done, this can be implemented at scale and can save further costs.
Further on with implementation of IoT (Internet of Things) the street lights can be &#;connected street lights&#; and will start serving more facilities to the citizens.
Hope everything is clear. But now, this blog is not just to be read. Make your own automatic street light, at home with family and friends and at school as well.
Do share your smart street light photo and video with us.
The company is the world’s best automatic street lighting system supplier. We are your one-stop shop for all needs. Our staff are highly-specialized and will help you find the product you need.