Brightness Controlled Solar Powered Intelligent Street Light

Smart city is a term that can be described as technology that promotes sustainable development practices. Due to inefficient design, most street lighting nowadays wastes a lot of electricity. A smart city’s key aims in streetlight management are energy economy and simplicity of maintenance with little manual labour. This research has designed an intelligent street lighting system that incorporates an automatic control mechanism for energy savings. The light intensity, the Wi-Fi network and the status of the streetlights were designed and monitored. An ESP32 microcontroller was used to process the sensor values and controls the output devices from the motion sensors and Light-Dependent-Resistor (LDR) sensors. The controller and sensors are powered by their Photovoltaic (PV) system. The solar panel is connected to TP4056 which acts as a charge controller for the Li-ion battery. The result has identified that the low-dropout (LDO) regulator power achieved consumption is 4mA. The clock speed of the ESP32 is reduced from 240Mhz to 80Mhz in reducing the power consumption. There is no performance issue was observed with the reduced clock speed. The use of light-emitting diode (LED) as the light bulb and controlled brightness provides lower power consumption of about 63.5% for 11 hours of usage. The use of solar power shows that street lighting is no longer needed to connect to the grid, and it is significant compared to conventional street lighting which consumes a lot of energy and requires a high cost of maintenance.