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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."
But that seems like a lot of RAM. Is it?
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?"
Or does a 206 MHz processor with 64 MB of ram seem like DRASTIC OVERKILL for a parking meter?
Seriously, what's the deal?
Poor parking meters now they'll be the target of drunk geeks as well as drunk frat boys.
"If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit." - Mitch Hedberg
Lemme get this straight..
Solar powered, in MONTREAL???
Guess the StrongARM takes less power than I thought...
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
Software should be free as in Free Parking.
My metamoderation cancels your moderation
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
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those! Hours of parking time could be finished in minutes!
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
So what is going to happen when someone comes along with a thick black Sharpie Permanent Marker and mark the solar panel all black?
...but does it run Windows?
You'll know they switched when you come to Montreal and the streets are bathed in an eerie blue light.
Parking meters are simple and reliable. Nothing like taking something that just works and replacing it with something else that is infinitely more complex, break-prone and expensive. Besides which, people will never use these things successfully. "Put coin in slot next to car" is as smart as people are. Seriously. People are going to pay for the wrong parking spots, pay too much money, and so on. Bad idea.
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 >;-)
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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I have a parking meeter "obtained" from the storage room of my local municipality about 20 years ago. They had been out of service for 10 years, and installed 10 before that. Old enough that you could buy 8 minuites for a penny, anyway. Now, when I was playing with it as a kid- it still worked. Heavy as hell, was death on toes, but it still worked. In 40 years, where will these be? How will they be safely disposed of?
Just like touch screen voting, this seems like a "because we can" application of technology. Sometimes there's no reason to replace what works. The old steel parking meters are quite literally bulletproof. I simply cant imagine any reason that makes networked meters any better.
Of course, when I moved to DC I sold my car and bought a bus pass, so what do I know?
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!
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)
Excerpt from SCO's reactionary press release: "Anyone who parks at one of these meters is in effect using Linux, and therefore owes SCO $699 + 25 cents per half hour."
-Darl
Somebody e-mail me the free parking exploit
Parking meters in London
London Congestion Charge
The congestion charge has pros and cons. It seems to reduce traffic somewhat, generates money to be used for buses, and probably cuts pollution. Some argue it works too well, hurting businesses in the central zone, and some people are occasionally sent a fine for not paying the charge even though they never went near the central zone. It works by a camera trying to OCR the license plate. The recognition can go wrong, and the camera can take snaps of people who don't actually enter the zone occassionally.
Still, personally I'm in favour of it - I don't drive in London because it gets in the way of my drinking.
This is not a sig
Surely this is a perfect use of the market to determine price. We all accept that if we book a flight at an off peak time we'll get a cheaper price - why not the same for parking? Cities get busy during the day but are often quieter in the evening. What a boon for restaurants if parking can be set at $2 for the entire evening. If there's a big evening even on then $2 is too cheap - all the spaces will fill and chaos ensues, so adjust the rate to $4 an hour and encourage folk to take the metro / bus / taxi instead.
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.
That would be nice for Canadiens games. But if you want me to attend an Expos game, you'll have to set the parking meter to pay me.
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I would like them to come up with a device (or a GPS plugin or whatever) which would show me the empty parking spots available in a radius around my current location.
I would think most people who work/commute downtown and don't want to pay monthly parking fees would be willing to shell out big bucks for such a feature.
Certainly beats crawling around the roadside for hours trying to find a parking spot.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
They don't want you paying the meter like you're supposed to. If you do, they only get 25 cents per 15 minutes or whatever (which would be a maximum of, what $24 per day? Even if they are in force 24 hours, which few are?). If you fail to pay, and the meter-maid spots it, they get $25 (or similar). They get more (possibly far more) for one ticket than for a whole day of good little parkers.
This is why there's often a short maximum total parking time limit -- gotta have turnover. The more people park, the more tickets have a chance of getting written.
This is also why you see news stories every now and then about people who go around feeding other people's meters getting arrested or otherwise harrased. These Helpy Helpertons cut down on revenue.
Municipalities don't want obedience, they want money. The parking-meter scam is but one method.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
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.
where do you think it holds all the quarters?
.
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
Just try getting those things to play sound. Even parking meters that ran Windows 95 could find the sound card with no problem.
Here are some more fun hacking ideas:
-Program the meters to play "We're into Money" in beep tones whenever somebody swipes their card.
-Program the meter to prompt the user to find out what class of car they drive. If it's a SUV, the meter will refuse to let them park because the gargantuan heap blocks out the sun the meter needs to run.
-Program the meter to randomly scramble PIN numbers that users input.
-Program the meter to randomly pop up Microsoft error messages. We wouldn't want parking meters to give Linux a bad name now would we?
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
With its cache.
*ba dum bum*
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Hi,
I work for Precise Parklink, the provider for the Toronto Parking Authority and many municipalities in Ontario and Western Canada. Our machines are solely based on a EPROM with very little data stored. Why would anyone need 64MB? Our machines also operate on GPRS GSM 'and' Mobitex, solar power, wireless, etc. There's no kernel, no flash card, and works great. One thing that would really impress me is if these Linux machines could accept debit, and most of all, if someone is able to hack it. Also, storing credit card data on a compactflash card garentees the data always exists, which is a bad thing if someone were to tamper with the machine. With our machines, the transactions aren't stored on the EPROM, but instead on RAM. If the machine is turned off or reset, the cc data is lost and the parker is safe from someone stealing their credit card number. Bottom line, the more advanced technology gets for parking meters, the more susceptable to fraud, bugs, and security issues.
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.