Author: myou

We consolidated all of our testing results so we can have easy to read statistics at our demo.

Finished our poster for demo day.

Prepared our setup for our demo activity:

• Bike on a trainer
• One video showing our testing videos
• One video showing the POV bike riding experience
• One screen showing our overall product statistics, such as reaction times, battery life, waterproof rating, etc.

We started writing our final report as well.

Put together the final presentation and prepared to present the slides. I also gave the oral presentation for CycleSafe on Monday.

We did more testing this week, especially focusing on fixing our blind spot detection and smoothing algorithms to avoid random flickering for alerts. We rode the bike around many parts of Pittsburgh on real streets, and have good footage to review. We will also have to analyze these videos for testing data in our final report.

We are preparing for the demo, and putting together videos/graphics/demo activities that will be fun for the audience to participate in on Monday.

• Constructed bike with Mike. Worked on the bus connection between the front sensor cluster and the back sensor cluster of the bicycle, including support for additional sensors if necessary and backup wires.
• Wrote better startup code for system which runs a full system test before running, starts up with the Pi, and waits to reconnect to the jacket if unsuccessful.
• Made the communication protocols more robust. We were getting issues where the serial interface with the Bluetooth chip on the Arduino was going out of sync. We solved this by using some magic sequences to ensure every message is properly aligned.
• Got bicycle clamps to mount the constructed system onto the bicycle.
• Got the trainer for demo purposes.
• Tested frontal collisions. Ran tests on the mall in front of Doherty Hall. We marked the walking path with distances, set up recording devices, and ran the frontal collision tests to determine both response time and alert lead-time, as well as determining false-positive tests on receding objects.

Got the demo up and running for Monday, but had to use a lot of tape to put things together quickly and allow for repairs.

I spent the next few days making the bike construction more robust. We finally got our bike clamps, so I added screw holes to the boxes and did a screw + hot glue combo to secure the boxes onto the bike.

I also built the turn signals for the bike. I decided to make a nice circular mount for the turn signals, and engrave a pattern on it to make it prettier and more usable. I also added an indicator LED so you know when your turn signal is on.

Finally, I helped with testing the bike this weekend. I’m going to prepare for the final presentation on Monday.

We got to demo our full product this week.

The first half of our week was dedicated to making our physical construction more robust, so removing the need for tape and clamping our boxes onto our bike.

The second half of our week was spent on testing, where we ran collision tests, blind spot tests, and other related tests for CycleSafe.

We are preparing for our final presentation next week.

I assembled the entire jacket, with waterproofing, cable management, and fully soldering all components. We tested the jacket, and all functionality seems good. The only part we’d add to the jacket is perhaps a case for the battery and board circuit.

Images below from top to bottom: the jacket board, debugging the circuit, heatshrinking for cable management and waterproofing.

I have been working on the rest of the Solidworks models. There are a lot of components, but so far it seems like they are fitting together nicely. We decided to have 3 main boxes on the bike. The main challenge with the models is that we have precise angles for the sensors, which takes more precise modeling. Fortunately, Solidworks provides the tools to fully define everything to precision. Below is a view of the back box of the bike.

I have only fully finished the back, but the front box should have similar components to the back box, so that should be easier to do. The 3rd box contains the battery, which is just a simple box with USB cable cutouts.

I will laser cut all the components this week and assemble everything. Then, I will mount the boxes onto the bike, which should complete the construction phase of the project, leaving us a couple weeks to do testing.

Sketched out the bike mount Solidworks models, mostly measuring dimensions and getting an overall idea.

We need to think about the bike attachment portion, since we might not be able to screw onto the bike. Some options:

1. Hot glue
2. Clamp
3. Screwing into the bike body

   

We got to demo this week, where we got to showcase much of the hardware features. The system is mostly reliable, but needs polishing and actual formal construction, e.g. heat shrink, gluing, printing out cases, soldering, before we can consider the hardware components done. We are waiting on the last 2 LIDARs to come in so we can mount everything onto the bike.

We are a little behind on the mobile app, but the software should be easy to finish once we fix some bugs there.

Monday:

• Designed protoboard layout for the bike circuit

Tuesday:

• Worked with Michael to establish communication between the jacket and the pi
• Wrote moving average collision detection algorithm
• Implemented and tested the communication protocol between the pi and the jacket

Wednesday:

• Demoed the jacket and pi communication, showing off all the features
• Discussed possible improvements for collision detection and integrating the device onto the jacket

I worked on putting the demo together to show our project progress.

I constructed the jacket with all of the essential components we aimed for, the LED matrix, buzzers, and vibration motors. The Arduino nano on the jacket was the microcontroller for all actions, and it received instructions via Bluetooth.

After some basic testing, we did a full wireless test, and got the jacket to work as expected. We did not permanently glue or sew anything directly on the jacket yet, because we wanted to gather feedback from our demo first.

For future steps, I will have to finish constructing the jacket, and make sure all the connections stay in as expected. I might also have to consider printing out a small case for the circuitry, since having exposed wires is potentially dangerous.

For next week, we are planning to mount all the LIDAR and ultrasonic sensors onto the bike. I am starting to design some mounting templates for these devices.