Smart Street Lighting Systems | IoT project using ESP8266

3 min readSep 2, 2021

What is Smart street lighting system?

A smart street light system incorporates a cluster of streetlight lamps that can communicate with each other and provide lighting data to a local concentrator. It allows facility managers to remotely control street lights while keeping track of electrical power consumption in the lamps and in the driving circuits.

Advantages of Smart street lighting system:

Increased citizen satisfaction

Reduced energy cost

Increased revenue opportunities

Project Aim:

Lighting for cities is costly, with energy and maintenance costs accounting for approximately 40 percent of its budgets. Transitioning to Intelligent street lighting represents a huge opportunity for municipalities to not only save a substantial amount of money on energy and maintenance costs, but also become a smart city and offer the platforms to create opportunities for effective and productive engagement with its citizens, businesses, and visitors. This project aims for designing and implementation of the advanced Internet of Things system for energy saving of street lights. Currently we have a manual system where the street lights will be switched ON in the evening before the sunsets and they are switched OFF in the next day morning after there is sufficient light on the outside. But the actual timing for these lights to be switched ON is when there is absolute darkness. With this, the power will be wasted up to some extent. This project gives solution for electrical power wastage and also the manual operation of the lighting system is completely eliminated.

The proposed IoT based system provide a solution for energy saving. We use IR sensor, Light Intensity sensor and NodeMCU (ESP8266) board to design an intelligent system. We use IR sensor for detecting vehicles on the road, Light sensor for detecting light intensity. Based on vehicles present on the road and light intensity, we control street lights. We can automatically ON/OFF lights or we can control brightness of the lights.

We use Blynk cloud and Blynk app for displaying the status of the lights. This project is implemented with wifi based board Node MCU (ESP866) which controls the street lights based on detection of vehicles or any other obstacles on the street. Whenever the obstacle is detected on the street within the specified time the light will get automatically ON/OFF according to the obstacle detection and the same information can be accessed through internet. The real time information of the street light (ON/OFF status) can be accessed from anytime, anywhere on the real time dashboard.

Components Required