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Shopping Center Parking Sensor Guts Revealed

Although I wrote about the Westfield Century City Shopping Center parking sensors before, I noticed that the one that I was parking under had been opened up and you could see the guts.

Just to refresh your memory, this mall has sensors above each parking space that lights a red or green light that you can see from far away to see if there are available spaces. Moreover, each parking level and area has a total count of how many spaces are available so you don’t waste your time going in an area without any spaces.

century-parking

It appears that the device is using sound waves to determine if the car is below but I’m not positive. It also looks like there is an Ethernet connector but no cable is plugged in. It might be used just for programming the firmware or somebody may have disconnected it. In any case, there has to be some type of network connection so that it can transfer information to a main server that collects all the information for tabulation.

In any case, it’s a lot of hardware just to keep track of where the cars are parked. Only 30 years ago, the tiny CPU on this board probably would have been faster then a desktop computer. I wasn’t able to hack into the system and make all the lights flash like Christmas but that would be fun. Or not.

 

One comment

  1. Nice article. They installed these at Cleveland Hopkins Airport a year ago. Nice touch and makes parking much easier.