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Hi, I am Pierre Castella and I am the CEO of Tinynode
Today, I am going to attend to the installation of our smart parking system
on a rest area of the French highway operator sapn.
sapn is a special customer to us because without them,
Tinynode would not be there today.
The journey between Tinynode and sapn started with a safety problem.
On the sapn highway network, some truck drivers used to park out of the dedicated areas,
quite often even on the emergency lane.
We wanted to know in real-time parking spaces availability on our truck rest areas
to be able to inform truck drivers
throughout our entire highway network
and be able to better dispatch the trucks across the rest areas.
In 2004, we have searched for off-the-shelf solutions to fulfill our needs.
As none existed, we decided to get a prototype developed.
That is when we contacted Tinynode.
They were recommended to us as wireless communication experts.
The sensor was developed with clear criteria in mind.
It had to be completely autonomous in terms of power and communication.
Through the development of our communication system
for events and conferences, we had acquired very strong competences
in radio communication and lowest-power electronics.
Quite naturally, wireless sensor networks
appeared as an interesting market for us.
We had the key elements of the solution in hand. We accepted the challenge proposed by sapn.
Immediately, we chose a radically different way, based on magnetic sensing.
We considered that the optical and inductive detections used traditionnally
were far behind in terms of detection accuracy.
In the tuning phase, I viewed hours of parking video streams.
Those videos were used to compare sensor data and ground truth.
They are quite boring, so that we decided
to share that pleasure with Tinynode!
We were a few hours away from the installation of the first pilot
and the sensors molding had to be done in a very short time.
During the installation on the highway rest area,
I unfortunately stepped on the surface of one of the sensors,
leaving a footprint in this company!
In conclusion, the system was the answer to the problem
and it was appreciated by the drivers. The concept had a future.
In less than a day, sapn staff will install 40 sensors. They will immediately be started up.
Variable message signs will display the availability of parking spaces on the equipped areas tonight already.
Thanks to this information, truck drivers will be able to optimize their travel.
sapn was a visionary on the vehicle sensors developed with Tinynode
Nowadays we can see that this system is widely developed on the French and European highway network.
10 years later, we can say that it was a fantastic experience
to be able to contribute to this success,
the success of Tinynode as a company. We wish them many more years of success to come!