I’m a truck driver based in Poland, and like a lot of you, I’ve had to deal with the constant worry about trailer curtain theft during overnight stops.

Most of the solutions out there are reactive — dash cams, GPS trackers, alarms that go off after the curtain has already been cut. They can help you figure out what happened, but by then the damage is already done.

So I decided to try a more proactive approach.

I’ve been building a LiDAR-based system that mounts to the truck’s side mirrors, monitors the area alongside the trailer, and turns on a bright, focused spotlight if someone stays there for too long.

No siren. No waking up the driver. Just a pretty clear “you’ve been seen” signal.

**How it works:**

▶️The LiDAR monitors a defined zone of 17.5 m alongside the trailer. Anything beyond that is outside the trailer’s monitored area and is ignored.

▶️Someone simply walking past → nothing happens.

▶️Someone stops and stays in the zone for a set number of seconds → the spotlight turns on.

That delay is pretty important. It helps filter out the normal stuff you’d see at a rest stop. People walking past the truck are obviously not a problem. Someone standing next to your trailer for more than two seconds is a different story.

The video shows exactly how it works:

**I walk past → nothing happens.**

**I step back and stop → after the delay, the spotlight kicks on.**

This is the first fully working prototype, so there’s still a lot I want to improve, but it’s pretty cool to finally see the system doing what I designed it to do.

I’d genuinely love to hear what you guys think. If you drive trucks and regularly deal with overnight parking, I’m especially interested in your feedback — what would you change, what would you add, or what do you think I’m overlooking?**  **

The project is supported by Bambu Lab Let’s Make It Fund. Feel free to check out my profile if you want to see the rest of the build and how I got to this point.

Tired of waking up to a slashed trailer curtain, so I built something to fight back