Lightener - Smart Streetlight
A MakeNTU 2022 smart streetlight with environmental sensing, adaptive lighting, and edge vision — Best Maker Award and STM 3rd Place
Lightener
Lightener is a smart streetlight system built at MakeNTU 2022, NTU’s annual 24-hour hardware hackathon. The idea starts from a simple observation: streetlights are everywhere, always powered, and always connected — yet they do nothing beyond illumination. Lightener reimagines them as distributed sensing nodes that adapt their brightness, monitor air quality, detect anomalies through vision, and report status over the network.
Motivation
Taiwan faces increasing pressure on its power grid, and streetlights are a significant contributor to urban energy consumption. Most run at fixed brightness regardless of conditions. Meanwhile, cities spend large budgets on separate infrastructure for air quality monitoring, traffic sensing, and fault reporting. Lightener combines all of these into the streetlight itself — saving energy by dimming when no one is around, and providing useful environmental data as a side effect.
System Architecture
Each streetlight node is built around an ESP32 with onboard sensors (PM2.5, ultrasonic proximity, ambient light, solar panel). The nodes communicate with a central STM32F746-DISCO server via MQTT, which aggregates sensor data and serves a web dashboard. A Jetson Nano with an Intel RealSense D435i depth camera handles edge vision tasks — detecting pedestrians and vehicles to trigger adaptive brightness and anomaly alerts. A GPU server processes the video stream for heavier inference.
System architecture — streetlight nodes communicate over MQTT to a central server with edge vision
Hardware
The streetlight structure is laser-cut from wood with a triangular LED head housing WS2812B addressable LEDs. Six streetlight nodes form a networked cluster, each equipped with its own sensor suite and solar panel. The physical build emphasizes modularity — each node can operate independently or as part of the mesh.
| Prototype testing | Demo at MakeNTU |
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Team
The Lightener team with the full streetlight cluster at MakeNTU 2022
Awards
Lightener won two awards at MakeNTU 2022:
| STM Award — 3rd Place | Best Maker Award |
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