Lab 03: Smart Parking with LCD and RFID

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Lab 03: Smart Parking with LCD and RFID Access is the third prototype in the Smart Parking Lab Series. It builds directly on Lab 01 (LEDs, buzzer, servo, IR sensors) and Lab 02 (LCD over I2C), so you should finish those first.

Until now, our system had one big weakness — anyone with a car could drive in. Real parking lots are not like that. A company parking, a VIP zone, a residential gate, a school staff area — they all need to know who is asking to enter, not just that a car is there.

In Lab 03 we add an RFID RC522 reader and a small set of RFID cards / key tags. Each card carries a unique number called a UID. When a driver taps a card, the Arduino reads the UID, checks it against a list of authorized cards, and only then opens the gate. Unknown cards are rejected the LCD shows "Access Denied", and the gate stays closed.

Two new technical ideas appear here for the first time. The first is SPI communication, a different protocol from the I2C you used for the LCD. The second is the idea of a whitelist storing a list of allowed UIDs and comparing them byte by byte. You will also see for the first time how two communication protocols (I2C and SPI) happily run side-by-side on one Arduino UNO.

By the end of this lab, your smart parking system will see cars (IR sensors), recognize drivers (RFID), decide who is welcome (Arduino logic), act on the world (servo, LEDs, buzzer), and talk back to the driver (LCD).