Street lights are everywhere, yet most of them still operate blindly turning on and off without knowing whether they are actually working. I wanted to solve this gap by building a smart street lighting system with fault detection.
The idea was simple: if a street light fails, the system should detect it automatically and report the issue remotely. I designed the system using an ESP8266, LDR sensors, and a relay module to control power and monitor light output in real time.
The system continuously compares ambient light levels with the actual lamp output. If the environment is dark but the lamp does not emit light, the system flags it as a fault and sends an alert via a mobile dashboard. Firmware was written in Embedded C with real-time sensor sampling and conditional logic for fault detection.
One of the biggest challenges was handling false positives caused by sudden light fluctuations. I solved this by adding threshold windows and delay-based validation, which significantly improved reliability.
The final system successfully automated lighting control while enabling proactive fault detection. This project strengthened my understanding of sensor fusion, embedded decision logic, and real-world IoT reliability.
Next, I plan to scale this system using mesh networking and cloud-based analytics.