Hackaday · Creativity & design

Solar-Powered Traffic Counter Uses Raspberry Pi and YOLOv8

A recent computer engineering project at the University of Cyprus developed a solar-powered device for monitoring vehicular traffic and logging data to the cloud.

The system utilizes a Raspberry Pi 5 with 4 GB RAM, running Raspberry Pi OS and a 720p webcam. Power is supplied by a 12-volt lead-acid battery, charged by a 100W solar panel and a charger module.

Vehicle identification is performed using the YOLOv8 Nano machine vision model, which detects cars, trucks, buses, and motorcycles. Algorithms ensure each vehicle is counted only once as it passes.

To optimize for solar power, the setup was configured for low power consumption. This included disabling Bluetooth, PCIe, audio, and HDMI, under-clocking the CPU and GPU, and running the system headless with reduced video frame importance.

AI-samenvatting op basis van de bron.