Problem

Street lamps are an ubuquitious part of most towns, cities, and major highways, providing light along roadways to help illuminate any issues with the roadway, including obstacles, potholes, and structural failures, keeping drivers and pedestrians safer. To keep these lights mounted to the ground so that they don't fall over onto the roadway and become an obstacle, they are secured with anywhere from 4-8 large bolts and nuts, which must be kept tight to ensure the light pole doesn't fall over. With hundreds of thousands of lights in Iowa alone, the number of bolts that must be checked is in the millions.


The current method for checking these bolts is to have engineers travel across the state every so many years and manually check each bolts tightness using a hammer. While this will ensure that each bolt is tightened on a regular basis, this is an incredibly time consuming job and requires a lot of labor to ensure the bolts are tightened. Finding a way to use technology to speed up this process would save a lot of time and money spent sending engineers to tighten each and every bolt when it's likely that many of them don't need tightened.

Our Solution

To solve this problem, we are developing the Radio Frequency Readout Device (RFRD). An extension of RFID technology, the RFRD will allow us to check the tightness of the street lamp nuts using capacitance, which will be read via a custom RFID tag, which we are desigining to gather data from the sensor. This RFID tag will be powered solely by the signal from an RFID reader, which will recieve the data from our tag and communicate it to an external device to store data and transmit the data to a remote server.


Our project must meet the following specifications:

  1. The tag must make a reasonable approximation of the correct capacitance value.
  2. The system must be able to function at a distance of at least 5 meters.
  3. The system must operate in a legal RFID range, either 13.56 MHz or the 902-928 MHz bands.
  4. The reader must be able to store data from tags using an external device
  5. The tag must be managable in size and cost less than $0.50 per tag to manufacture.
  6. The reader should not take more than one person to operate

Deliverables

Semester 1
  1. A prototype of the custom tag circuit, capable of transmitting static data
  2. A prototype reader that is capable of accepting data from any valid tag
  3. A website containing information and documents regarding our project
Semester 2

A batteryless system capable of receiving and sending a signal, consisting of:

  1. A custom RFID circuit capable of transmitting capacitance data
  2. A reader that is able to read tag data and send received data to another device
  3. Software capable of storing captured data both locally and in the cloud