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/i_used_to_run_fast]

This feels like a DIWHY more than anything else, what is the end goal here exactly? Seems like bored boomer behavior. Why go through all this effort to take grainy pictures of speeders? You gonna email them to the courthouse? 2025 version of an old man shaking his fist on his porch because some kids walked on his grass or something.

[u/doxx-o-matic → u/i_used_to_run_fast]

How do you equate neighborhood safety with "get off my lawn"? At least the OP did something and was proud to show it off. I mean, it's not like the OP is 44, scrawny, and trying to figure out how to start getting in shape.
We had a little girl on a bike get killed because of a careless driver in a neighborhood. I bet this would have been very welcome in that neighborhood, or even mine, for that matter. In a world of constant surveillance, you want to complain about one more camera that might actually do some good. Maybe you should look at your accomplishments and think to yourself, "What if some a-hole on Reddit tore you down for something that you had every right to be proud of?" Then go touch some grass and re-center.

[u/mixduptransistor → u/doxx-o-matic]

These cameras don't do any good. Do you think someone who will mow down a kid would slow down because of this sign? All that is going to come of this is OP is going to be the annoying guy at city hall sending in pictures that can't be enforced, or posting pictures of people on Facebook to "shame" them even though this thing is not calibrated

The answer is proper enforcement of the law, by police officers, not by a surveillance state that is hardly accountable and more often setup for revenue generation rather than safety

[u/supercargo → u/mixduptransistor]

Sadly they will be too busy texting to notice the sign. But yeah, bringing shame to people who endanger the lives of others would probably be taking it too far

[u/yugami → u/supercargo]

maybe they'd be too busy looking at the sign to notice the kid

[u/mixduptransistor → u/supercargo]

yeah, it's great that in our system we let random strangers with no training or sense of any rules or fairness be judge, jury, and executioner. probably the best way to do things