Slashdot Mirror
Montreal Parking Meters Run Linux
jbecherv writes "According to LinuxDevices.com, new-fangled Montreal parking meters run embedded Linux (Google Cache). The City of Montreal is planning to roll out 500 to 800 wireless, solar-powered parking payment stations based on embedded Linux. There is even a
device profile
(Google Cache) that show some details about the meters... These meters run kernel 2.4.19 on a 206MHz StrongARM SA-1110. Each system has 64MB of RAM, boots from a CF device, and is networked wirelessly via GPRS."
I can't recall where it was, but some other city tried using solar powered parking meters. They never worked due to insufficient light.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Before people broke meters so they wont have to pay, now their gonna break 'em and take 'em home so they can use them!
i'm not saying embedded windows is safer, i'm just wondering if someone could easily hack this system, it would be interesting if someone got free parking in the city
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I wonder how many sunny days and how many actual sunlight hours those park meters get in Montreal. Specially in winter. How big are the panels? Mars probe technology is being deployed?
Detroit is rolling out high tech ones too
Evolution or ID?
so like... how long till theres an exploits to get free parking?
But there's no harddrive, so it can't use swap space and it has to have the whole (probably very small) filesystem in RAM.
Isn't it London that has some sort of tax for people traveling into downtown with a car? If I remember right they said it works wonderfully.
it would be cool if you could pay for your car online if a meeting runs long or something. other than that, this seems like more of a waste of money and raises the risk of them getting stolen. stealing the old fashioned ones is cool, but stealing a bunch of portable solar computers would be bad-ass!
few hunderds of spare 200 MHz ? I wonder if their administrator will resist the tempation of installing disturbed computing client (like seti@home, or distcc >;-)
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
Montreal actually has an excellent subway system, and fairly narrow, busy downtown roads. (More European-like than any other city I've been to in North America.)
:)
As someone who learned to drive on the crazy downtown streets of Montreal, I feel I can happily endorse city's public transit.
The Device Profile states, "The stations run a Linux distribution that 8D developed in-house." Where is the source code? I searched:
8D
http://www.8d.com/
But couldn't find anything. How can we efficiently build on 8D's work to build a better, competitive parking meter without the code?
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
Sounds like these meters will automatically tell the parking officer when your time is up. They could even combine them with pavement sensors and photo recognition (or RFID!) in the future to automatically ticket you.
In greater Vancouver, we have dodgey characters that drive around with hacksaws, decapitating the meters for the change inside. A thousand dollar parking meter gets destroyed for $40 in change.
In Montreal, it will be geeks with hacksaws. Rather than being tossed into a lake, the parking meters will show up in a home-built robot.
There was an article in the Seattle PI today about Seattle's plans to do this exact same change:
The article also talks about how Portland made the same switchover, and the successes they had:
Neil
This is nothing new. As a matter of fact its a more efficient way to handle it. Instead of one meter to every spot there is one meter per block or so. I don't know what the going rate is on a traditional parking meter but I guarantee one more expensive unit is cheaper than 20 lesser units......when you figure the maintenance costs and the costs involved in emptying said units. It takes less time for the metermaid to check, therefore more time they have to be checking the other units. It makes more efficient use of thier time. With the addition of roadbed sensors the parking meters could alert the metermaids to violators whose time has run out but the vehicle hasn't moved, resulting increased revenue from parking offenders.(not likely but an option)
There is the additional benefit where people can use alternative methods for payment. Having to put a quarter in a machine sucks....but if I can pay 2 dollars for an hour with my creditcard...it doesn't seem like that much. Its the same psycology behind pokerchips at a casino. Separate the value from the currency and people are more likely to spend more. Its on the card....I can pay for it later. P) Not saying I like the idea, but your basis for calling it a bad one is kind of unfounded. Look at it from the view of the City. Politics aside...the goal is to make money from parking.
We have them here in London... At first glance they're not obviously solar powered because they're kinda tall. Only a geek would notice... (or care)
good luck on that.
how about doing an rtfa?
an overly simple parking meter of course wouldn't need more than one timer circuit, but how about you take a look at the article and see what it can do? gprs connectivity, pay anywhere from the city(for time extension you don't need to get back to your car), ticket maids can get the map of paid/not-paid parking slots to their handheld devices (they can check while just driving past the parking lot), cc handling..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Solar powered is great, but what happens when those Montreal winters come blasting?
Most batteries don't fare well as the temperature plummets towards -40, either.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
In Toronto they have similar meters that print out paper tickets. They only use their wireless connection to process credit cards though, the meter maids still walk around to inspect the slips of paper on the dash boards and issue tickets.
The benefit of the Toronto system is there is never any residual time on the meter. If you pay for 2 hours because you only have a $2 coin and then drive away after 20 minutes, the next guy gets no free time.
I guess the Montreal folks determined that they'll make more money from the increased speed in finding non paying parkers than they would have with the overpayment scheme that Toronto has.
Bastards.
The previous posts are right on the money as far as the potential usefulness, and cost savings of these meters.
/. hacker community.
1 . I could see it as very useful especially if they program these up to send SMS messages to your cell phone when time is about to expire and allow you to recharge the meters via your cell phone.
2. Turn them into potential advertising machines. The LCD screens can run mini commercials on a small screen and generate more money for the city. I can also see this as a perk, you get free parking for watching the ads and responding to the questions just to ensure you're really watching the ads.
3. Have them accept smart cards or credit cards only. This would eliminate the need to hire people to manually go to each meter and collect money out of them.
4. Set them up to take a picture of your plates when your meter runs out they could just send you a parking ticket to the address of the vehicle's owner. This could save money by eliminating parking enforcement officers and making easy money for all those expired meters that enforcement officers never catch.
The cool possibilities are endless. I just hope that they figure out a way to keep them secure from people like me and the rest of the
I dunno about you, but most parking meters I've seen have been made out of nice, solid metal to keep people from breaking in and taking out the change. I think these meters would be built the same.
Also, they would probably have batteries to keep them running during periods of no sun... Otherwise, free parking on cloudy days, or you put in your money, come back and have a parking ticket because a cloud passed over the sun and reset the meter.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
Now, all you need to do is to get root access and never pay for parking again! I bet there would be a good buck in making a keychain which wirelessly adds time to your parking meter.
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what's right. --Isaac Asimov
Actually, if a parking meter can someday tell me wirelessly that it's unoccupied, that's not that bad an idea. :-)
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
Municipalities don't want obedience, they want money. The parking-meter scam is but one method.
The scam in my city is "street cleaning days". In the 20 years I've lived here I've seen an actual street cleaning machine on my block only once. Yet up to 60% of the parking spaces will be unavilable on any given day due to street cleaning revenue enhancement. The might as well just issue a parking permit, charge $200 for it and be done with it. It would be cheaper for those of us whom work nights.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
Here's why:
There's one meter per block, at each parking spot there's a sign with a number. A123 or A435, B342, etc. You read your number, go to ANY machine in Montreal, punch in that number and you can put money in your meter. Now this is where they got greedy. They got sick of people using leftover time from previous 'customers' so any time you add money to a specific spot it resets to 0.
So if there is 2 hours on the machine and I want to add an hour (you can only have a max of 3 hours) I will have to pay for the full 3 hours. Furthermore you can not see how much money is left on the meter except by looking at the ticket it prints.
So if you have class and need to add a bit of money to the meter so it'll last till the end of class you have to add the full amount since it will restart.
Now for the mischief. There's nothing stopping you from punching in someone else's number, adding 25 cents and reducing there time to 15 minutes! Essentially guaranteeing a ticket.
So if someone has 3 hours on there meter, and you come by and put in 25 cents it will go to 15 minutes. This can be handy to use against people you don't like or just random strangers with nice cars, etc. Anyways it seems like a big problem.
The only thing I was thinking is that maybe the machine will keep track of the OLD value as well as the new value to prevent this, but it's still screwing over people who want to add money to their own meter.
It just occured to me that without the ability to display the ticket on your car, anyone with or without a vechile can buy all the parking space availability in the city and can resell these tickets for a higher price than the city. I think it would be best for a 'pay-and-display' method on your car dash.
The article mentions kernel modifications. Specifically, they had to make significant changes to the power saving routines in order to meet their solar/battery power limits. When you're mucking around in the kernel, you're tightly linked to the software.
However, as mentioned above, if I make changes to a kernel for something I'm selling, the only people I have to distribute source code to are my customers. This is important, and often overlooked, since plenty of people also, kindly, allow free downloads of source code for their GPL projects. This, however, is not because the GPL requires it. It's because they consider everyone their customer.
Businesses like this distribute their products to a handful of organizations. They must include the source code, or an offer for the source code. They do Not have to make source code downloadable on their website, or even offer it to people Not buying their product.
Naturally, though, if you were to buy their product, request and obtain their source code, you are fully within your rights to redistribute that code freely to others, in compliance with the GPL. You can put it up for download on your website, or you can, in turn, only make it available to your customers, ad nauseum.
You are quite badly wrong if you assume from availability of DIMM and Flash cards at PC stores that small memory and flash do not exist any more, same slow CPU's.
RAM and flash measured in _bytes_, CPU's under 10MHz continue to sell a lot. And yes, they are quite a bit cheaper than something like these (which seems to be basically guts of a high-end PDA)
Of course you don't find any of those at store, they don't belong there, they are embedded system components, found at electronics store, not something you pick up from shelves at wallmart.
As whether or not you'll save a "significant amount of money" depends mostly on the volume, $10 vs $50 CPU is't much of a difference if you're building one unit and design costs far overweight everything else, but if you're making a million of 'em, that's a lot of cash. There's a place for everything.