Holleman Drive is located almost exactly half way between the FM2818 site and George Bush. Holleman is a secondary route for College Station Fire Dept Station 4 responders and therefore is an intersection worthy of consideration.
Equipment
College Station Traffic bucket truck assisting in the camera installation
Currently there are two monitoring systems operational at Holleman. The first system is a "snap shot" camera. In essence this is a webcam that supplies snapshots from the intersection. The camera is mounted high up on a signal pole and employs a wide angle lens. The field of view of the camera includes all traffic lanes to the south and west. In addition the rail line at and south of the intersection is visible.
Getting power and running the coaxial cable
Support equipment for the webcam includes a Win95-based field computer running Webcam32. The Webcam32 software package has shown to be very reliable and cost effective. External communication to the site is via a traditional telephone modem to a local Internet Service Provider (ISP). The ISP choice enabled TCP/IP software to be developed for other needs within the cabinet and to leverage the wealth of Internet software currently on the market. The rail monitoring software pulls an image from the Holleman camera at the moment that the system estimates the train at the intersection. An application runs on the PC to keep the PC clock synchronized with an atomic clock via the Internet.
Perparing the Holleman traffic signal cabinet for video support equipment
The second system in place is a TTI designed and constructed preempt monitoring system. A very low cost microcontroller-based "computer" monitors the traffic signal preempt and relays information to the PC. The PC hosts a "preempt client" application that forwards the information to a "preempt server" located in the TransLink TMC. With the installation of "keep alive" software on the PC the normal dialup connection runs continuously and will automatically reconnect when dropped.
