Green Traffic Light Reminder (anti-honking)

Nothing to do while we wait for the PCBs to arrive...

Traffic lights in my city are 12V variant so for testing purposes it is enough to connect our electronics directly to the traffic light bulb power supply. Bulbs are LEDs by the way.

In our case the PIC12F629 is powered from the green light bulb itself, and also the optocoupler on GP5 is also connected to power supply in order to provide information that green light is ON. This optocoupler is redundant in this setup, but I left it for situations where PIC would not be powered from the green light power supply.

Optocoupler that is connected to GP4 is connected to Vehicle Detector. Vehicle Detector must be setup so that it provides signal at output when vehicle is detected AND parked (not moving).

When both conditions are met the LEDs should start blinking. That is it!

Anything installed to traffic lights must undergo strict QA & QC, and must satisfy various standards required by the law. Unfortunately I can not do anything about those at the moment, because this is just an idea prototype (with actual implementation) without any funding at all.

Blinking green light can be implemented as an additional small traffic light, just like those used for bicycles but only with a green lantern that would be installed lower, somewhere at the same height as driver's eyes. Another idea is to use a higher power green LED with directional lens so that when it blinks it shines directly into the stopped vehicle that is keeping still in front of the traffic light.

Both of these should be enough to catch an attention of oblivious driver even when they are not looking at it directly. Unfortunately we can't do anything about sleeping drivers :-)

Two inputs are required to decide if we should start blinking:

1. Enable (when traffic light is currently green)

2. Not-moving (if car is not moving)

When both conditions are satisfied the microcontroller should start blinking LEDs. We might also allow 0.5 or even 1 second delay before starting to blink, but this should be experimented in the field.

Finally got the Detect Stop functionality working perfectly for my ILD project, it can be seen in the video at 7:50:

Detecting vehicles is a project by itself, so here we will focus on what we already have and that is an Inductive Loop Vehicle Detector (ILVD or ILD). Simply detecting vehicles is not enough because we somehow need an information whether vehicle is parked/stopped and not moving, because once the vehicle starts moving we need to stop reminding the driver about the green light as he/she obviously got that information.

We can do this with an additional functionality of some better ILDs on the market that detect stopped/parked vehicles or we could build one our self (https://www.elektronika.ba/868/dual-channel-inductive-loop-vehicle-detector/). So lets start experimenting...