University of Massachusetts

Web Based Parking Managment using RFID

Advisor: Lixin Gao

Finding a parking spot in congested areas especially in major cities like New York City can be a frustrating and daunting task. A motorist may drive around for up to two hours looking for a place to park depending on the time of day. A motorist may find a parking spot just as someone is leaving if you are lucky.

Our solution to this problem is to put an RFID reader on ever parking meter. Cars will be outfitted with RFID tags that will activate when the car enters the space. The RFID reader will then start a count of how long a car has been parked in a spot. When the car leaves the spot, the time the car has parked is stored into a database. For more information look at the left pane.

[04/29/2005] Public Demo Day	^ TOP
Public Demo day was a success. We showed off our project to other professors who were excited to see a working project. Members from the community were also interested and took home brochures. View the brochure here (large .png files): side-1 side-2
[04/15/2005] Babson College Meeting	^ TOP
After CDR, we had a meeting with two people from Babson College who were interested in our project. We spoke about the project and gave them a simulation/demonstration. They were very excited. There may be job prostpects for us.
[04/15/2005] Comprehensive Design Review II	^ TOP
Refinement of the code was shown at the Comprehensive design review. It was seamless integration when a user moves their RFID tag near a parking reader. The tag is read, an entry is put into the database and then through the website interface we are able to see when that car parked, where that car parked. The text message warning system is functional. We are able to send a warning to a customer 15 minutes before the parking meter expires.
[03/09/2005] Professional Design Review II	^ TOP
Kevin and Kai have worked their code together. We are now able to read a tag and enter it into a database, determine whether a car left or entered a spot. We also record the time and the parking location. The PDR II panel was once again impressed by the software that we had created but were not happy that it was mostly a software project now. Power consumption may have been circumvented by the fact that we can use these RFID readers as gate parking meters. If we do this we are unable to be specific about which cars are parked where to be able to tell which spots are open.
[12/22/2004 - 01/26/2005] - Winter Break	^ TOP
Kevin has refined his code to send a command to the RFID reader, receive a response and interpret it. Kai has set up a server with Apache, MySQL, PHP, PostCast Server (mail) so that Kevin can enter parking transactions into the database.
[12/10/2004] - Midterm Design Review	^ TOP
The MDR panel was impressed with the hardware we had purchased in order to get our project going. They also steered us in the direction of wireless communication between RFID readers, similar to motes. This way a dedicated link to the Internet isn't needed by all RFID parking meters. Once again power issues and scalability issues were expressed.
[12/06/2004] - Preliminary Code Functioning	^ TOP
Kevin was able to send a command to the RFID reader receive a response! Kai is working on the database design and code to insert transactions into the database via PHP
[11/20/2004] - SkyeTek Development Kit Purchased	^ TOP
We have had many troubles implementing SPI for the communication between the PIC. We found a development kit sold by SkyeTek. This development kit includes the RFID reader (SkyeRead M1) and Java development code that can be compiled into an API for software packages. View the SkyeTek M1 Datasheet
[10/25/2004] - Professional Design Review	^ TOP
The PDR panel thought our idea was excellent, but they warned us that we would have many issues with power, and the communication link: using RS-232 on a large scale. They mentioned that all our reader's would have to be wired underground which is very expensive.
[10/16/2004] - System Block Diagram is up!	^ TOP
The System Block Diagram has been revised and uploaded. The system block Diagram is also up, Check the pane on the right.
[10/16/2004] - More samples to come!	^ TOP
We have ordered some PIC16F877A microprocessors from Microchip, they will be shipped out on 10/19/2004
[10/15/2004] - Our samples have come!	^ TOP
The samples from TI have arrived. As we were admiring our samples, we realized that the IC is so small that we would need to put it in a socket to put it on the breadboard. After checking the datasheet we noticed that the chip comes in an SSOP 20 package. So now we need to order an SSOP 20 DIP package, a 13.56Mhz crystal and capacitors and resistors that arent readily available to us in the lab. We are going to order from Mouser Electronics, hopefully we can get some samples.
[10/08/2004] - Samples Requested	^ TOP
We have requested some RI-R6C-001A and RF-HDT-DVBB samples. Both of these items work at 13.56MHz.
[10/06/2004] - We have found an acceptable RFID transponder IC!!!	^ TOP
We will be using a TI RFID Transponder IC in order to produce a low cost reader that we will be able to put in every parking meter. We should have it by the end of next week! Here is TI's datasheet for the RI-R6C-001A
[10/04/2004] - Website Launched	^ TOP
This is the website for the RFID Parking Managment project. We will be using to show others our project and the progress we have made on the way.