Overview

OVERVIEW

Nowadays many local car parks are built inside shopping mall or multipurpose building to provide parking lot to car driver. Car park inside a building is become popular in many shopping central because it user friendly and can prevent car from exposing to the sunlight. This type of car park normally poses a parking guidance system that primarily based on the use of message signs to give drivers information regarding parking availability inside the car park. The availability of parking lot inside car park normally is obtained from the sensor that count the number of cars entering and exiting or, in other cases, by comparing the tickets issued at machines. This information of parking lot availability inside car park is generally expressed in terms of ‘full’ or ‘empty’ on display board at the entry of car park. The actual number of parking availability inside car park is rarely given.

            Everyday, hundreds of cars enter the car park and looking for empty parking lot inside car park. Therefore, it is difficult to find out an empty parking lot. Inside most local car park, car drivers sill need to find out an empty parking lot themselves. They will definitely waste a lot time for searching an empty parking lots if they do not know where they are, especially when there are only a few of empty parking lot available at each row of parking lot. Therefore, it is important to have an effective empty parking lot tracking system to display empty parking available at each row of parking lot and guide car driver to there.

            The development of this project prototype can act as way-finder to guide car driver inside the car park to parking lot available inside car park and guides car driver to go there. It is a PIC microcontroller based project. It uses the infrared sensor to detect the vacancy of each parking lot at a level of car park, sending signal to microcontroller to process and display total of available parking lot on seven segment display, at the same time, an arrow also used to shows the location of these available parking lots.