[n4r9]

How much power do you need to be continuously running video/snapshots, OCR software, and comms? How expensive a solar panel is needed to generate that power, will it work overnight and through the winter, and will it also be theft-resistant? What's the cost of petrol for driving 4+ hours per day? How will you get coverage in parts of the country that aren't near your home/office?

[londons_explore]

About 1.2 watts to capture+process 1 frame/second - thats how much my current phone uses, and I suspect a cheaper platform will be more power efficient. You'd use a 5 watt solar panel (costing $4) in the southern USA, and a 10 watt panel (costing $9) in the northern USA. You would aim to rarely have spare power - in winter, you just drop the frame rate and the comms interval.

With more engineering effort, you can probably dramatically reduce power usage, for example by discarding parts of the frame that cars never drive through, which should allow extending the hardwares lifespan as batteries age and solar panels get covered in dust.

[n4r9]

Well, I'm slightly less skeptical than I was before. I'm not convinced you can break even for much less than $100 per instance, and I think the risk of getting into trouble is quite high, but there could be something to it.

[arethuza]

There is a fairly new automated weather station at the side of the road not far from where I live here in Scotland - the solar cells are actually quite large - I'd guess about 0.50m by 1m. The whole setup is also pretty substantial probably to cope with the fact that supporting solar panels in a windy location requires a fair bit of strength!