Pothole Finder

Overview

Pothole Finder is a device installed on cars that detects potholes, and then informs the city by sending them the GPS coordinates of the potholes.

Inspiration

This project was inspired by personal experience. As a novice driver, I am not comfortable with swerving the car just to avoid a pothole, so the annoyance of hitting a pothole and the possibility of damaging the car suspension is a problem in my day-to-day life. To solve this issue, I thought about a way to collect pothole data through cars, and then sending this information to the related agencies so they know where to conduct repairs.

How It Works

The accelerometer detects sudden accelerations in the vertical direction. When this acceleration exceeds a certain threshold, the program recognizes it as hitting a pothole and then outputs the GPS coordinates to the serial monitor. Then, a Python program takes the output from the serial monitor and uploads the GPS coordinate to a database. Then, the coordinates are plotted onto Google Maps to provide a holistic assessment of the severity of pothole issue at each reported location.

Video