Raspberry Pi GPS Pothole Tracker

All things considered, we in the modern world have it pretty good road-wise compared to our ancestors. At the same time, moving at modern automobile speeds means that the odd pothole is an annoyance at best, and a danger to people and equipment at worst.

To help combat this problem, sciencedude1990 came up with a custom pothole tracking module using a Raspberry Pi Pico W, a compact u-blox SAM-M8Q GPS module, and a red push button. When sciencedude1990 hits a pothole, he can mash the button and it records the location of the hazard on an Adafruit 1895 FRAM breakout board. The system blinks the button's LED and chirps via a buzzer to indicate the record has been saved. Data can then be pulled once at a computer and reported to the authorities to get things fixed.

As for why you’d want to make such a device, sciencedude1990 notes that "[he knows] you can get AI based pothole detection for your phone, but what fun is that?” He also notes that it was a good excuse to work with with an FRAM chip, a style of memory which is non-volatile and quite fast.

This sort of input could also be used for non-pothole GPS tracking, as it can be activated for any condition. One might even add a vibration sensor or other input gadget, allowing it to pick up on whatever conditions you see as relevant automatically. Code for the project is available on GitHub.