Design and Implementation of Smart Taxi Fare Meter and Server Based Electronic Payment System

An idea of development of a smart yet cost effective fare meter which can accurately measure the distance and also can give solution to the fare payment difficulties using a web server based dedicated smart card for fare payment, all accumulated in a single system has been proposed in this paper. Our main goal is to digitize the current system in such a way which would be of convenience both for the driver, vehicle owner and the passenger. The state of the art includes automatic online tariff upgradation system, to be controlled by the regulatory authority whenever there is a necessity to change the tariff due to various reasons. This makes it unique from the existing system as upgrading tariff becomes easier and comfortable which is too much time consuming in the present system. A miniature taxi has been developed having the proposed features onboard. The display unit displays the parameters by means of the number of rotations of the wheel and total waiting time using Infrared Ray receiver and emitters. This system mainly consists of an Arduino developing board, a Liquid Crystal Display, a Radio Frequency Identification Module, a GSM Module, an Encoder and a web server interface. Smart Card is used for payment via an onboard RFID reader which is an Active Reader Passive Tag system. GPRS feature of the GSM module has been used to transfer data between Arduino and web server.