Project

Project Description

The project is to standardize sensor assembling process and optimize the functionality of sensor logger in support of the development of instrumented bike. The instrumented bike was first developed by two EE476/486 teams in AY 2018 with a goal to detect anomalies (cracks, potholes, bumps, etc.) along bike trails. The sensor logger consisted of a microprocessor, accelerometers, Global Positioning System (GPS) unit, battery, computer board (Arduino board), and Wi-Fi device. When an instrumented bike traveled on a bike route, the vibration data/signals were collected by the sensor logger attached on the bike and were wirelessly transferred to the smartphone where the data processing and computing methods were immediately performed, and the anomalies were georeferenced and shown in a map. However, three years after its development, a sensor logger is in need of upgrade and standardized process in order to better support the operation of an instrumented bike.


Clients


Potential Benefits and Applications

The Instrumented Bike system will be used by NAU faculty and students to detect, record, and analyze bike trail anomalies. When the system is mounted on a bike (such as NAU rental bikes), it will detect any bike trail anamoly that the bike passes through and it will save the location and severity of the trail anamoly to the SD card. Then, the Operations and Maintenance staff can easily use the recorded data to find and fix the damages.


Requirements Specification


Project Design

The project revolves around two systems, one in the front and one in the back of the bike, and each system has its own rechargeable 3.7V battery. Since the two systems share similar coordinates, adding another GPS chip to the second system is unnecessary. The microcontroller saves the data collected from the GPS and accelerometer chips to the SD card before uploading the data to the NAU servers.


Hardware