Bicycling has been shown to provide many benefits, including: environmental, social, health, economic and transport. It produces minimum fossil fuel emissions, is affordable to almost 80% of the world’s population, is a source of exercise, reduces cost of travel and uses much less road space as compared to other modes of transport. However, bicycling also has some problems that bikes are far more sensitive to the camber of the road and changes in shape, texture and road quality for cyclists.

Now, instrumented bikes can reduce the effects of these problems with a bike instrument that can warn cyclists in advance about adverse road conditions such as extreme uphill or big dips and bumps.

Moreover, instrumented bikes build a system that senses accelerometer changes and can then communicate with other riders that there may be a problem ahead, riders will be able to adjust their path to make safer and more efficient travel. Also, the instrumented bike includes, developing a system that maps trail conditions and sends data to a nearby laptop computer. Then it can be able to store data on a smartphone, and instrumented bike can communicate the findings to other riders.

All in all, instrumented bike makes bike riding a better, safer, and more enjoyable experience.

Our client has requested that we have a working product by the end of the April 2018. It is important that we are able to meet this deadline. His specific list of requirements include:

    ● An instrument attached to a bicycle that accurately records trail conditions and the locations of bumps and dips.

    ● A communication system that allows riders to be alerted before they encounter these hazards.

    ● A working demonstration with more than one bike and its sensor.

We have been given a list of parts that our client is providing including, an accelerometer, a GPS module, a box enclosure, and many more. We will need to combine all of these components in order to meet our customers needs. The production of this project will require many different phases. First, we need to calibrate the accelerometers and correctly record its data from the bike trails. Once we have this data stored on a centralized location, we will be able to send this data to other riders when they approach a hazard zone. With the appropriate hardware, there are many ways that we will be able to alert riders. One way, is with a small flashing LED on our device. Another way (more complicated though), is using a notification system on the user’s mobile phone.

Because our team only has about 7 months to complete, our client is tailoring his expectations. The client wants to see that this idea can be implemented and the concept can be proved. Our findings and research will then be used to develop consumer technology that could be implemented by companies with more resources, time, and money.

Sensor structure

Battery System (Battery & Booster)
Data Collection System (Accelerometer & GPS)
Micro Controller (Arduino Nano)
Data Communication (Bluetooth)
Alert (Buzzer)

For the first peototype, Accelorometer and GPS are used for data collection, then use Arduino to communicate with smartphone.

For the data communication, we choose the server from cloud for our data base, data transmit from one bike to another from the smartphone application and server.

Arduino Nano

The Arduino Nano is a small, complete, and breadboard-friendly board based on the ATmega328P. It has more or less the same functionality of the Arduino Duemilanove, but in a different package. It lacks only a DC power jack, and works with a Mini-B USB cable instead of a standard one. We choose Arduino as the microcontroller of the whole sensor system.

Triple Axis Accelerometer

This accelerometer is a smart, low-power, three-axis, capacitive MEMS circuit with 12 bits of resolution, packed with embedded functions with flexible user-programmable options, configurable to two interrupt pins. Embedded interrupt functions allow for overall power savings relieving the host processor from continuously polling data. Due to popular demand, this version of the SparkFun Triple Axis Accelerometer Breakout includes pre-soldered male headers for better ease of use.

This is acceleration data which the accelerometer collected.

Generally, we transmit these data to .csv files and use Micreosoft Excel to build a polyline-geographic. By analysis these data, we can know how the road condition is and how big these road hazard are.

OpenLog

OpenLog is an open source data logger that works over a simple serial connection and supports microSD cards up to 64GB. We can use this board to record data from other sensors. The OpenLog can store or “log” huge amounts of serial data and act as a black box of sorts to store all the serial data that our project generates, for scientific or debugging purposes.

Bluetooth module: HC-06

HC-06 is a Bluetooth serial pass-through module wireless serial communication compatible with Arduino. We use this part to achieve the communication between sensors and smartphone. The communication will be stable within 10 meters.

GPS module

The Global Positioning System (GPS), originally Navistar GPS, is a space-based radio navigation system owned by the United States government and operated by the United States Air Force. It is a global navigation satellite system that provides geolocation and time information to a GPS receiver anywhere on or near the Earth where there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or more GPS satellites.

The system is based on real-time GPS data acquisition module getting the information of latitude and longitude. Advantages of this system are mainly that through real-time GPS positioning, without human intervention, it can be accurate for an automatic station in order to achieve energy and high reliability.

Buzzer

A buzzer (or beeper) is an audio signaling device, which may be mechanical, electromechanical, or piezoelectric (piezo for short). Typical uses of buzzers and beepers include alarm devices, timers, and confirmation of user input such as a mouse click or keystroke. In this system, the buzzer is used to alert biker when the device is approaching a bump.

Cell phone application - Data Reciever

Raw sensor data

This application shows users the raw data, which is Acceleration, Speed, and GPS. It is also used to check the connection between cell phone and device.

All of these data will be stored in both cloud server, and SDcard of OpenLog.

Application - Bump Map

We developed this application to show users the position and levels of bumps on our inserted Google Map.

The basic algorithm to judge the bump is:

Orange: Normal (1.3G - 1.5G)
Red:       Severe ( >1.5G)
Delete:   No bump detection at the same location after 5 times.

All of these point on the map will be refreshed once the cloud server get new data.

The Primal Prototyping

As we can see, from top to bottom of the breadboard is GPS, OpenLog, and Accelorometer. The black board is Arduino Uno.

In this version, we didn't use the battery, nor any module to communicate with the cell phone, the only way to get data is from SDcard in OpenLog. This prototype is mainly used to check the primal function (Acquire Acceleration and GPS information).

Wireless Communication Prototype

To achieve the communication between one bike to another, we first used the antenna. However, due to the technical problem and transmit issues, we have to cancel this plan.

Fortunately, the Bluetooth module works perfectly between the cell phone and device.

The Final Prototype

The final version of prototype integrated all the functions from the previous prototype: Data collection, Bluetooth communication, Data storage, and Battery charge.

We use this version to test system stability to find where we need to change or update.

Road Test

After the finalization of the design, we put the final prototype to the road test, to make sure the acquired data is accurate and reliable.

The First Version of Production

Once the prototype achieved all the test requirement, we transferred these components to another container.

This Red Project Box is the first choice because of the low-difficulty to assemble. Due to its large space, we successfully remained all the function.

Bike-Device Mounting

There are three ways to mount our device to bikes, through the road test and data comparison, the middle-frame is the relatively best place we found.

We still provided other ways to mount, which means you can mount it anywhere - as your wish

The Final Version of Production

To make it more appeal and commercial, we planned the second container, which is a double-structured glass enclosure box

We combined two boxes, then assembled our components into this tiny box. But the restrained space made us did some change - to cancel the OpenLog. (We can still store the original data in Cellphone Application).

The Cellphone Application (Andoroid)

This is the campus road test result on cellphone application.
(Orange - Normal; Red - Severe)

Application Download