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May 16, 2023

Faulty Parking Meter Tracking System? RFID To The Rescue!

How often do you see problems that need fixing? How often do you design your own

How often do you see problems that need fixing? How often do you design your own solutions to them — even if they won't be implemented at scale? Seeing that many of the municipal parking lots in his native Sri Lanka use a paper ticketing system which is prone to failure, [Shazin Sadakath] whipped up his own solution: an efficient RFID tag logging system.

Digging out an HZ-1050 RFID reader — as well an RFID card and two tags — [Sadakath] set to work connecting it to his Raspberry Pi and cooking up a batch of code and a dashboard to work with. A Python script — using a PiGPIO library — reads the Wiegand Format RFID number, storing it in an SQLite3 database. A Bootstrap, Javascript, and JQuery trifecta make up the dashboard that pulls the RFID info from said server and organizes it into a functional format.

An RFID keyed system like this might be difficult to realize for even a small portion of the parking lots, but it's a potential solution nonetheless. RFID entry systems can certainly be a functional solution in an office-scale environment for those with similar initiative.