We created a helpful car park assistant for a helpful car insurance company.

DEVK - We created a helpful car park assistant for a helpful car insurance company.

98,6% of all drivers admit to hating car parks, where tiny spaces and concrete walls conspire to ruin your car. The DEVK with its reliable and customer-friendly car insurance plans decided to tackle this nuisance. The insurance company claims to “Turn your problem into their problem”. To live up to this philosophy, it came up with a techy, yet funny solution. A car park equipped with dozens of talking boxes that gave (mostly) useful hints and directions for drivers.

The social media campaign that followed the stunt turned out to be a success, too. The crucial view-play-rate increased by 10% above threshold and 200.000 more website visits were recorded. All this contributed to an increase of 23% insurance contract closings during the campaign.

Let’s talk tech.

We had the feeling the world needs real car park assistants. Badly. So, we developed and built real devices. 

We started with a Raspberry Pi as the development board at the core of our car park sensor. It's cheap and easy to combine with a vast array of sensors or displays. Unlike other development platforms, it has built-in IoT capabilities and runs rapid prototyping languages like NodeRED on top of Linux.  

 

The pre-recorded audio snippets were triggered by the distance between the approaching car and the box. To estimate the distance, we integrated the HC SR04, an ultrasonic sensor with a perfect range between 2 centimeters and 3 meters. Up to 50 times per second it issues an inaudible sound and listens for its returning echo – just like an electronic bat. The distance calculation is handled by the Raspberry Pi using the time taken for the sound to return.

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The pre-recorded audio snippets were triggered by the distance between the approaching car and the box. To estimate the distance, we integrated the HC SR04, an ultrasonic sensor with a perfect range between 2 centimeters and 3 meters. Up to 50 times per second it issues an inaudible sound and listens for its returning echo – just like an electronic bat. The distance calculation is handled by the Raspberry Pi using the time taken for the sound to return.

Let’s talk tech.

We had the feeling the world needs real car park assistants. Badly. So, we developed and built real devices. 

We started with a Raspberry Pi as the development board at the core of our car park sensor. It's cheap and easy to combine with a vast array of sensors or displays. Unlike other development platforms, it has built-in IoT capabilities and runs rapid prototyping languages like NodeRED on top of Linux.  

 

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For the displays we used two panels of Digitdots, a low-cost matrix with 64 addressable WS2812B RGB LEDs.
After extensive testing, we decided not to rely on onboard speakers. Instead, we used Raspberry Pi’s BLE Audio capabilities to power a large, external speakers that were audible within cars.

Develop and test.

From the initial idea to the final prototype, the car park assistant went through several stages of testing and iterations.

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For the displays we used two panels of Digitdots, a low-cost matrix with 64 addressable WS2812B RGB LEDs.
After extensive testing, we decided not to rely on onboard speakers. Instead, we used Raspberry Pi’s BLE Audio capabilities to power a large, external speakers that were audible within cars.

Develop and test.

From the initial idea to the final prototype, the car park assistant went through several stages of testing and iterations.

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