Parklio – when IoT saves your precious time

A Smart Barrier which frees up your time in searching for a parking by protecting your parking spot. It can also be widely used as key element in realizing Smart Parking initiative of Smart City in congested urban areas.

The search for available parking place increases the traffic volume; the problem called cruising for parking causes more than 30% of the usual total traffic congestion. The average time for searching an available parking place is up to 20 minutes. According to other studies this percentage could be much higher and so in a borough of Munich (Schwabing) even exceeds 44%  and in a borough of Brooklyn, NY (Park Slope) exceeds 45%.  In addition, from an economic point of view, only in one year, the specified congestion caused in America 4.8 billion hours of delay, 7.2 billion liters of additional fuel consumption, and the cost of 101 billion dollars. Only in Los Angeles the search for available parking places took 178,000 liters of fuel (which is enough to circle the world 38 times) and produced 730 tons of carbon dioxide .

There are always talented people out there to tackle a challenge and turn it into an opportunity. Parkilo is an incredible solution developed from idea to a working product within twelve months by Amplifico, an ultra-nimble startup who could have re-defined what we know as Time to Market in the IoT industry.

Parkilo is a smart connected parking barrier that protects your parking place using a smartphone. With Parkilo you can easily control and share your parking place with your family and guests via the mobile application by enabling key sharing. Parkilo has a sensor which detects vehicle departure and close the barrier automatically.

“We have all been subject to the situation of being late to a meeting or just wandering in the city in the hope of finding a parking space. Parking is an indirect service required for personal mobility and access to locations. In places where demand is high (high concentration of people) and supply is scarce, the need for regulation is extremely high and with that the net worth of each parking space is increased.

Parkilo is an innovative yet cost effective solution to protect your parking place. All you have to do is fasten the Parkilo with provided screws to the ground and install our free App on your mobile. We guarantee that your parking place will be protected. It’s not related to plan for a little town or a giant city, Smart Parking is probably one of the essential prerequisites toward a Smart City.  By sharpening our expertise, we will be able to offer other products and solutions including electrical vehicle charging systems in the parking spot,” said Mr. Dario Boras, CEO & Co-Founder. “We have chosen Quectel SC20, as it eliminated significant development risk by using a reliable, rigorously tested and certified integrated solution. SC20 is an industrial grade module with extended temperature range of -40°C ~ +75°C, equipped with ready and certified built-in Android OS.”

Based on Qualcomm’s chipsets, Quectel offers the most powerful engine in the market. The chipset CPU uses the ARM RISC instruction set. ARM Architecture CPUs have a RISC architecture typically requiring fewer transistor than those with a complex instruction set computing (CISC) architecture (such as the x86 processors found in most personal computers), which improves cost, power consumption and heat dissipation.

SC20 is Quectel’s new generation of multi-mode Smart LTE Cat 4 module with built-in Android OS. It contains seven variants: SC20-CE, SC20-E, SC20-A, SC20-AU, SC20-J, SC20-EU and Wi-Fi & BT only version SC20-W. It supports LTE FDD: B1/B3/B5/B7/B8/B20, LTE TDD: B38/B40/B41, WCDMA: B1/B5/B8, GSM: 850/900/1800/1900MHz in its SC2-E version designed to meet all frequency bands in EMEA region. SC20 delivers maximally 150Mbps downlink and 50Mbps uplink data rates based on LTE network, and additionally supports wireless communication via IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n (IEEE 802.11 b/g/n for SC20-CE/SC20-W by default) and BT4.1 LE (BT4.2 on Android 7.1 or later versions). It is ideal for both industrial and consumer applications requiring high data rate and high-speed internet access. SC20 is backward-compatible with existing EDGE and GSM/GPRS networks, ensuring that it can be connected even in remote areas devoid of 3G or LTE coverage.

SC20 supports multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology. The use of multiple antennas at the receiver end at the same time and on the same frequency band greatly minimizes errors and optimizes the data speed. The module also combines high-speed wireless connectivity with embedded multi-constellation and high-sensitivity GNSS (GPS, GLONASS and BeiDou) receiver for positioning.

A rich set of interfaces (such as LCM, Camera, Touch Panel, MIC, SPK, UART, USB, I2C) extend the applicability of the module to a wide range of M2M applications, such as MID, PND, POS, router, data card, in-vehicle solutions, smartphone, digital signage and industrial PDA.

“The technology burden on IoT was eased somewhat with the introduction of Smart Module that combines compute, connectivity, and storage in a single device to provide intelligence to a broad range of IoT use cases. Smart Module simplifies circuit design and reduces associated cost; decreases device product size and weight as well as power consumption, improves performance-to-price ratio and enhances end device price competitiveness,” said Mr. Tomaz Rehar, Quectel Regional Sales Manager South East Europe, who added that ”Parkilo project proves that how Smart Module rich features can be optimally utilized by a Smart company to design a Smart Device, in a Smartest possible manner.”

[1] EU, Passenger cars in the EU – Statistics Explained – European Commission, http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/, Accessed on: 15 May 2017

[2] US. Data and Statistics — Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Accessed on: 15 May 2017

URL: https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/data_and_statistics/index .html