SparkFun Forums

[jmardukas]

Hi all,
Complete newbie here and may be in over my head as far as my skill set. But thought I'd ask anyway. Plus I'm a quick learner.

Anyway, I wanted to make my own speed/traffic camera to basically detect cars that speed through a stop sign in front of my house. Is that possible? Was reading up on LIDAR technology and seems awesome! Then found this site and the LIDAR Lite v3.

Would love to figure out how to program this and hook it up to a camera or a web server or something.

Am I crazy??

[darrellg]

The LIDAR Lite is for measuring distance, not speed.

[Pop24]

The LIDAR Lite is for measuring distance, not speed.

Speed = Distance / time

You program the device to measure at regular intervals, therefore you know the difference in time between distance measured at t1 and t2, you also now know the distance the object has moved in that time (d1 -d2). So you can therefore calculate speed

I believe alot of traffic police speed guns use a LIDAR based technology.

Also looking at the data sheet for the LIDAR lite V3 (Garmin) there is a register specifcally called velocity. Albeit this gives the delta in distance between previous and current distance measurements, not an actual velocity measurement, but the name of the register alone implies some form of velocity measurement can be gained from this device.

Hi all,
Complete newbie here and may be in over my head as far as my skill set. But thought I'd ask anyway. Plus I'm a quick learner.

Anyway, I wanted to make my own speed/traffic camera to basically detect cars that speed through a stop sign in front of my house. Is that possible? Was reading up on LIDAR technology and seems awesome! Then found this site and the LIDAR Lite v3.

Would love to figure out how to program this and hook it up to a camera or a web server or something.

Am I crazy??

The problem you'll have is that if the LIDAR is in a fixed position, it wont be fixed on one point of the car, therefore as it moves towards the LIDAR you will invariably move from the front bumper to say the windscreen which is a distance of at least 1 metre change in itself skewing your velocity measurement. You'd need to track and aim it at the vehicle somehow.

[electronick]

Hello,

I'm reading this post and have a similar idea but I'm wondering if this could be done using two sensors.

Lets say that the two sensors are spaced by 1 meter and booth of them are perpendicular to the road. If the sensor is able two detect short interruption, we can store the time of the object arrives in front of sensor 1, time of the object arrives in front of sensor2, and based on that we can calculate the speed of the object.

This require two sensors in place of one but I would like to use this setup if you think this will work.

Thanks in advance for your replies.