EV

WS

OUR SOLUTION

Have you ever seen an ambulance, police car or firetruck with its sirens blaring and lights on, trying to get to an emergency, but it is stuck in bumper to bumper traffic? This happens all too often, and it can cost lives.

Every minute counts in an emergency and traffic can cause extensive travel times of emergency vehicles: up to 15 or even 30 minutes in some cases. We are attempting to solve this issue with the Emergency Vehicle Warning Sign.

Drivers in an emergency vehicle can press a button that turns on an LED on the Emergency Vehicle Warning Sign, which will tell drivers to move to the side of the road so the emergency vehicle can pass through quickly, and save precious time.

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ABSTRACT

MARKET

WHAT ARE WE SOLVING / MARKET

Our target market is going to be to governments/cities because we are aiming for our Emergency Vehicle Warning Sign to be mainstream just like any other sign. We found that there is a slightly similar product called Blinkersign, however that sign only notifies a driver on the road when an emergency vehicle is entering or leaving the station, and is directly sold to those stations so it would not be a competitor.

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METRICS

METRICS THAT MATTER

BEHIND

BEHIND THE IDEA

DIAGRAMS

CIRCUIT DIAGRAMS

TROUBLESHOOTING

When we went through the testing period, our main issue was the code. The build is relatively simple so we did not have issues with that aspect, however, the code is more complex due to the usage of the NRF transceivers. We had to learn how to code them so the majority of the testing was troubleshooting and making tweaks to the code, such as adjusting the frequency channel of the NRF's or using different NRF libraries or using different functions (such as Input vs input_pullup for the button) until we got the code to work properly. We also attempted to use different types of technologies such as an LFC(long frequency communication) chip in order to communicate the information from the emergency vehicle to the song however we realized that the NRF24L01 was the best option because it could communicate quantitative information such as whether the sign is on or not.

In addition, we also were looking at different approaches to our problem. We thought of many different things including sending a signal to the stoplights to change to red when the emergency vehicle would be approaching. However, we realized that this would just cause more problems because it would stop the flow of traffic, leaving the Emergency vehicle stuck. In addition, we have researched different ways in which governments aid emergency vehicles to get through the flow of traffic and get to their desired destination. One of the ways they do it is using the help of stoplights, as mentioned prior. However, the government has control over every stoplight in the city so therefore they change all of the stoplights that lead to the accident green so the emergency vehicle can get through as fast as possible.