This dissertation examines an IoT-based smart car parking system used in Rwanda. Rwanda is a nation that has to be intelligent in a variety of areas, including agriculture, health, and transportation, particularly in terms of parking. People are affected by a variety of parking issues, including time and fuel waste from looking for open parking spaces. They eventually start parking in prohibited areas. Different effects of these issues include air pollution, backed-up traffic, and frustrated drivers.

The suggested smart car parking system makes it easier for drivers to locate open parking spaces automatically and decreases the amount of wasted time and fuel needed to find for open parking spaces.  The goals of this study were to develop a smart car parking system, have it automatically find parking spaces, communicate information about parking status to the cloud, show it on a smart phone using an Android application, and compare the data currently accessible with the newly designed system. The new car parking system uses less time and less fuel than the prior system, which took a long time and consumed a lot of gasoline to look for available parking spaces.

The new system is easier to use, more efficient and improves safety and security. It is made up of a servo motor, ESP8266 Wi-Fi module, IR (infrared) sensors, Arduino Uno microcontroller, and Thingspeak cloud.  The drivers use an Android application that is loaded on their smartphones to access the data stored in Thingspeak's cloud (Note that we can also use our own dashboard designed in PHP). The real-time monitoring and management of available parking spaces, as well as vehicle occupancy, are made possible by the smart auto parking system established in this work.