Smart Gazebo Reservation System

What it does

Smart Gazebo lets visitors book picnic-area gazebos in advance and shows, on screen and on site, whether each one is taken. Visitors pick an empty gazebo before they arrive, choose a time slot and confirm. On site, an LED light on every gazebo shows at a glance whether it is available or booked.

The problem is simple: on busy days visitors walk the whole area looking for an empty gazebo, while the operator can only tell which ones are in use by going to look. Smart Gazebo gathers this in one central system and shows it to both sides at once.

How it works

The visitor journey takes a few steps:

1. The visitor opens the picnic area in the web or mobile interface and picks a gazebo shown as empty on the map.
2. They choose a time slot; for that period the gazebo cannot be booked by anyone else.
3. The booking is created once the online payment is confirmed. Without confirmation, no booking is opened.
4. The visitor receives a booking number and a QR code.
5. On arrival, the QR code is scanned at the site entrance to verify the booking.
6. Scanning the QR label on the gazebo itself confirms the rental.
7. When the gazebo is booked its LED turns red, and when the booked time ends it turns green again.

The QR code is used at two separate points and does two different jobs: at the entrance it verifies the booking, and at the gazebo it confirms that this gazebo belongs to this visitor.

The key design principle is that the central application is the single source of truth for bookings; the LED is only a display layer. If a gazebo temporarily loses its radio link, the booking stays valid, and site staff can keep verifying rentals by scanning the QR code with the mobile interface. Once the link is back, the LED automatically syncs with the current state held centrally.

Technology

The system has three layers:

• Gazebo unit: an LED indicator, a LoRa radio module and a QR code label. The unit runs on mains power. The QR label is a passive component and needs no power.
• LoRaWAN gateway: placed area by area, it collects radio traffic from the gazebo units and forwards it to the network server.
• Central application: holds booking and payment records, live occupancy, the management panel and reporting. Visitors and site staff reach this layer over the internet.

LoRaWAN was chosen for its range. Picnic areas are large and spread out, so a separate internet connection to every gazebo is not practical; with LoRaWAN, many gazebos reach the central system through a few gateways. The data involved is tiny: a gazebo reports only its status, and the centre tells it only what the LED should show.

The gazebo units operate as LoRaWAN Class C devices. For an LED to turn red the moment a gazebo is booked, the device has to listen continuously for commands from the centre. Continuous listening is not a low-power mode, so the design relies on mains power being available at the gazebos. This removes the need for solar panels or battery packs, and with them the routine work of replacing batteries.

How many gateways an area needs is not decided on paper. Tree cover, terrain and mounting height all affect range directly, so coverage is planned from on-site measurements before installation. The frequency band used (EU868) falls under the Turkish telecom regulator's (BTK) rules for short-range radio devices.

Where it is used

The system is designed for picnic areas, recreation grounds and similar outdoor sites where many gazebos are spread over a wide area. Not every gazebo has to be bookable: hardware is fitted only to the gazebos opened for reservation, and the rest can stay in open use as they are today.

The project is a system design prepared for public-sector use. A pilot installation in a limited area is planned first, to verify the LED unit's outdoor durability, gateway coverage and the full booking flow end to end. The same LoRaWAN network can also serve as a shared communication backbone for other sensors that may be added to the site later.