Design of an Automatic Street Lighting System with Daylight Sensing and Timer Control for Rural Roads in Zamfara State

Rural road lighting in Zamfara State, North West Nigeria, is largely absent or ineffective, contributing to road traffic accidents and insecurity at night. This project presents the design of an automatic street lighting control system that combines a light-dependent resistor for daylight sensing with a real-time clock module for programmable on/off scheduling, reducing unnecessary electricity consumption while ensuring reliable night-time illumination. An Arduino Nano microcontroller arbitrates between LDR input and RTC timer schedules to determine the lamp switching state. TRIAC-based solid-state switches control the mains supply to 40-watt LED street lamps mounted on five prototype poles. A current monitoring circuit detects lamp failure and sends an SMS alert via a SIM800L module to a central maintenance coordinator. The system was installed along a 500-metre stretch of the Gusau-Tsafe road and evaluated over a two-month period. Automatic switching operated correctly in 98.3 percent of day-to-night and night-to-day transitions observed during monitoring. The SMS fault-alert system successfully notified the maintenance coordinator in all four lamp failure events that occurred during the evaluation period. Energy auditing showed a 22 percent reduction in electricity consumption compared to a traditional timer-only switching system, owing to LDR-based adjustment for seasonal variation in sunrise and sunset times. The system demonstrates a cost-effective, scalable model for improving rural road safety through automated lighting management. Keywords: automatic street lighting, LDR sensor, RTC timer, rural road safety, Zamfara State