If problematic potholes drive you round the bend, this practical device might improve their chances of being repaired. This #MagPiMonday, Nicola King checks her tyres
Potholes are becoming an increasing problem the world over – on regular trips, you get to know the spots on the road to avoid and, when you find a new hazardous hole on your highway, you and your suspension certainly feel the sometimes damaging effects. So, what if you had a way of recording the exact positions of these troublesome fissures and fractures, so that you could then alert the relevant authorities to fix them?
Finger on the button
Well, it’s a nuisance that ScienceDude1990 decided to tackle, following one particularly hard and pothole-inducing winter in his native Canada. He was determined to try and deal with the headache of his local potholes for the greater good: “I think it is my civic duty to help out. Potholes can be annoying for cars, and very dangerous for cyclists.”
After gathering a few components, a little breadboarding, coding, and soldering ensued, and the result of his endeavours is the GPS Pothole Tracker, the key elements of which are a Raspberry Pi Pico W, an Adafruit LED arcade button, a buzzer, a u-blox antenna module (for GPS), and a FRAM (ferroelectric RAM) breakout for data storage.
For portable power, the GPS Pothole Tracker uses a USB power bank. Out in the field, when the user is near a pothole, they press the button. If the GPS is locked, the tracker records the button press in the FRAM. “The Pico W takes in the input from the GPS, gaming button, and then stores the GPS locations, and gives output to the user in the form of the light of the button, and the buzzer,” explains ScienceDude1990. When the user gets home, they can then open a text file and send any pertinent pothole information onto whoever needs to have it.
ScienceDude1990 says that Raspberry Pi Pico W was easy to use with MicroPython and Thonny when coding for this device. “The development environment is very lean, fast to learn, and perfect for these kinds of projects.” The most challenging aspect was learning how to use the ‘os’ commands in MicroPython to work with the FRAM board.
He describes using the FRAM as a “side quest”, as he was keen to see how he could work with the FRAM chip and the Pico W, and says he was “pleasantly surprised” at how easy it was to format, mount, and use.
Mission accomplished
The good news is that ScienceDude1990 has actually used his device on his local roads, alerted his obliging local authorities to the presence of pesky potholes, and got the job done! “I used it to log the potholes in the spring, and then submitted them to my city’s service request system. The potholes were fixed in a timely manner. Joy!”
All that’s needed now is a case of some kind to protect the various components and make it a little more aesthetically pleasing, as currently the device is very much in its raw form. “Definitely going to make a nice case for it,” he says. “[I’ll] probably laser-cut something out of clear acrylic at the library makerspace.”
It’s a relatively simple make, but ScienceDude1990 suggests a little bit of soldering practice might be useful before a complete newbie attempts to make one. “I would suggest breadboarding with push-in wires first. Then practise soldering, or use some kind of quick-connector scheme. His informative Hackaday project page gives links to the GitHub code he wrote, and includes a Pico pinout connection diagram.
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