[From the last episode: We ended our roundup on sensorsA device that can measure something about its environment. Examples are movement, light, color, moisture, pressure, and many more. with gas sensors, which make up yet another category for health and safety applications.]

I used to live in the Silicon Valley portion of California’s Bay Area. That put me about 45 minutes south of San Francisco (with no traffic). More than once I drove up to the City (as they call it – sorry Manhattan…) to meet friends at some local tavern, driving for 45 minutes, only to spend yet another 45 minutes trying to find parking. No, this wasn’t downtown. Just a popular area where it was incredibly hard to park within a half mile or so.

I’m sure many of you have encountered the same thing – probably worse. Or perhaps you’ve wandered aimlessly in your car through clogged parking garages, hoping against hope to stumble across a free spot without someone else sneaking in ahead of you.

Yeah, parking is a problem in lots of places. It’s an area of focus for so-called smart cities – towns that incorporate leading-edge technology in order to… well,… make the city work better. And parking gets high billing, not just because it’s a problem, but also because technology solutions are within sight.

A New Parking Sensor

I pick one example today of a company whose press release I received recently. It announces a new parking management system, the ParQSense Smart Parking Sensor, that can detect whether or not there is a car in a parking spot. The company is Q-Free, from Norway. Their announcement was made via another technology company, Silicon Labs, since the sensor module used their computing chipAn electronic device made on a piece of silicon. These days, it could also involve a mechanical chip, but, to the outside world, everything looks electronic. The chip is usually in some kind of package; that package might contain multiple chips. "Integrated circuit," and "IC" mean the same thing, but refer only to electronic chips, not mechanical chips. for wireless communication.

They quote a study suggesting that that 20% of urban trafficRefers to any kind of electronic message -- email, web request, streaming video, or anything else -- that travels over a network. in some areas involves people simply looking for parking (I couldn’t find that specific factoid in the article they linked to). The USA Today story that originally reported on the study says that, on average, Americans spend 17 hours (and $97) a year looking for parking. In our big cities? It’s way more – over a hundred hours in New York City.

But let’s be clear: this isn’t a new problem, nor would this Q-Free solution be the first one. Ironically, the company that did the study above, Inrix, apparently has their own parking solution. I know personally that the Portland, Oregon airport has parking sensors in its garage – signs point to areas with available parking, and you can see the red or green lights above the cars as you drive along. So it’s been done – and is being done more. I regularly see press releases from Park Assist.

So why focus on Q-Free? Perhaps because it’s there? I saw the announcement and thought that it helps tie together a lot of the things we’ve been talking about.

Two Sensors Make One

The news is specifically about a new parking sensor that combines both radar and magnetic field technology to decide whether there’s a car in place. Why two? Well, radar tells you whether there’s something there. But anything that radar can see would count. Adding a magnetometerA sensor that detects magnetic fields -- from the earth or from anywhere else. leverages that bugaboo we discussed: magnetic anomalies. A car contains lots of metal. It therefore creates an anomaly – in this case, a useful thing that helps us detect a car.

This would be another example of sensor fusionThe process of combining information from multiple sensors (real or virtual) in order either to give more confidence in a result or to come up with something completely new.: the results of the two sensors come together to provide a higher-confidence indication that, “Yes, there is a car in that spot.” (Or, preferably, “No, there isn’t. Get here quick!”)

But that’s just the sensor. It’s no good unless the results go  somewhere. Which they are, using wireless technology. They describe the results being aggregated onto space-available electronic signs that drivers can refer to when figuring out where there’s an open spot. Getting that info into a navigation system would be even better, having your car direct you to a spot (assuming you had a way to reserve the spot so that there weren’t five people aiming for the same spot).

Unlike some of the other applications we’ve seen, we don’t really have any actuation going on here. It’s just information. Now, if we had self-driving cars, then the next obvious step would be making the car go to the spot as the actuation step. As it is, humans do the actuatingA way of controlling some device electronically. It might turn the device on or off or change a setting or property or do any other thing that the device is capable of. based on the information they see.

The Rundown

So, relating the Q-Free (and other) parking solutions to the four basic IoT elements, we have:

• Sensing: this is really the star of the particular news I saw, combining radar (yes, that’s a sensor) and a magnetometer to detect whether a car is in a spot.
• Communication: the car availability is radioed home to a serverA computer with a dedicated purpose. Older familiar examples are print servers (a computer that controls local printing) and file servers (a computer used for storing files centrally). More modern examples are web servers (the computers that handle your web requests when you use your browser) or application servers (computers dedicated to handling the computing needs of a specific application). Servers are often powerful, expensive machines since they have to handle a heavy load..
• Computation: the sensor data is combined (possibly with other data too) and aggregated into displays for signs.
• Actuation: no actuation here (unless you consider sending data to a sign or navigation system to be actuation). At least until we have self-driving cars…