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/DrewsWoodWeldWorks]

People in our neighborhood thought cars were speeding so they complained, the city spent thousands a radar speed sign. The city analyzed the data and the sign was having the reverse effect. Most people realized they had been used to going 20 when the speed limit was 25 so they sped up or tried to set a daily record. The dipshits that complained realized they had zero skill in speed estimation. The court stopped maintaining the sign. Net effect: thousands wasted and traffic is going faster.

Until you can directly tie the data to speed related accidents in the view of the camera, all you have is data and a creepy way to record the neighbor kids.

[u/e28Sean → u/DrewsWoodWeldWorks]

Sounds about right.... A lot of those signs just blank out now if you go really fast, specifically because people were trying to see how high they could make it register.

..... I might have been one of those people....

[u/nionvox → u/e28Sean]

One of the cities near me had one that just did a happy or sad face if you were under or over the limit. Apparently that worked better lmao, people felt bad getting a sad face!

[u/Reworked → u/nionvox]

Reminds me of how "honor boxes" for coffee saw basically nobody paying when it was a sign with words on it asking people to pay their share, but a picture of a pair of eyes got like five or six times the baseline in contributions.

We are social monkeys that don't like misbehaving when we feel like someone can judge us for it