My DIY radar speed camera: Mullet Edition—Business in the front, party in the back.

[u/nutstobutts]

I've found a nice way to hide my radar speed camera on the street so I can start testing it. From the front, it just looks like every other slow down sign. In the back, is where the party is at.

I cut a small hole in the sign for the camera and attached it all (radar, camera, wifi, and solar panel) to the back. Of course the solar panel looks way out of place. Without it no one would ever see the radar unit, so I think I will power it with a long cable instead. Right now I'm using a second sign to hide it from the rear.

Performance wise, it's working far better than I expected. The radar has a range of about 130ft-180ft (about 40-55 meters).

Attached are 2 photos it took automatically. One is of a white SUV driving from left to right which is about 180ft away.

The second is a white sedan driving towards the camera, this car registered 14 MPH when the photo was taken.

I still need to figure out the best speed and timing for the photos to get the car much closer to the camera. A video would be nice but I think images will be easier to manage.

Of course this thing is nowhere near ready and still needs quite a bit more work. I'll open source everything in a few weeks once I fix some glaring problems. I'm also combining all the dev boards into one board, so it'll be about 3 times smaller than what you see in the photos.

[u/nutstobutts]

Just in case poeple didn't see my post from last week, here's the camera and radar unit. The photo and speed data get uploaded to a database automatically.

[u/OzarkMule → u/nutstobutts]

Why are you doing this? Preliminary data for the city?

[u/nutstobutts → u/OzarkMule]

I’m doing this because I built a cool radar unit and I’m trying to find things to do with it. Sometimes there are assholes that fly down my road so I’m curious how fast they’re going. I have a hammer and am in search of nails

[u/PocketPanache → u/OzarkMule]

Preliminary

I think you got the key word. City wouldn't accept this unless unless they're a licensed professional using legally accepted methods of data capture. It could be useful to help trigger an official intervention, but would not be grounds to make change on itself, if that makes sense. If it were ever challenged and made it to court, things like calibration of the device and accuracy would come into question.

[u/95beer → u/PocketPanache]

Preliminary data is still good data to have though, right? I.e. anyone else would just complain about people speeding, but if you could say "people are doing 15 over with the worst offenders being 3pm to 5pm on weekdays" (as an example) then you know when you are going to get best bang for buck with a follow up official radar trap

[u/OzarkMule → u/95beer]

Yeah, that's the only thing I can see that makes sense. Essentially developing a presentation for a city council meeting to address whatever speeding concerns they have and ask the city to intervene in some way. Irrelevant in court, but is a better argument than nothing in persuading local officials to look into it.

[u/58jf337v → u/nutstobutts]

Please post how you built it, it's on my project list 😀