PNI Update: MEMS Parking Sensors
Article By : Steve Taranovich, EDN
Businesses like to have a good parking space turnover in their area to help keep a steady flow of potential customers passing by their stores. Smart parking technology provides a solution to this need.
In January of this year, I wrote about PNI Sensor Corp’s new MEMS parking sensor, PlacePod.
Now, here at the MEMS & Sensors Executive Congress 2017, I met once again with Becky Oh, PNI President and CEO, and Robin Stoecker, Director of Marketing, for an update on that technology.
Businesses like to have a good parking space turnover in their area to help keep a steady flow of potential customers passing by their stores. Smart parking technology provides a solution to this need. See the following YouTube video.
Becky Oh told me of a pilot program going on in Fresno, CA which had PNI’s technology installed in 16 parking spots which ultimately led to 360 violations, a surge in revenue for the city, and will lead to increased turnover of those parking spots.
Another pilot program was instituted in Montreal, Canada and soon there will be another in Alamonte, CA, where the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) level was too low, so they will be adding gateways to solve that problem.
Here is a high accuracy, smart parking sensor technology example. (Image courtesy of PNI)
In May of this year, PNI announced an alliance with LoRaWAN provider, Sennet, to offer PlacePod service. PNI also has a version of PlacePod for use over Sigfox, one of the other leading LPWAN (low power wider area network) providers, who has built the only global operated LPWA IoT network to provide high capacity and high service level while operating in the unlicensed ISM frequency bands.
Steve Taranovich is a senior technical editor at EDN with 45 years of experience in the electronics industry.
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