Passing Distance

[PrettyboyTim]

Well, further to this post, I've upgraded my range sensor and stuck it back on the bike. I shall be testing it from tomorrow.

The changes are that it now gives you a measurement in feet and inches rather than just inches (The picture above is old - and there is also a metric mode). It also takes account of the width of your bike so that it gives you the distance from the tips of your handlebars rather than the distance from the sensor itself. I've given it its own enclosure and an on/off switch.

There's no new pictures yet, but I hope to put some up soon.

I've also been putting a little information about it on the web, to help anyone else out there who fancies making one...

The Bicycle-Mounted Overtaking Range Sensor

 

[bonj2]

So it gives you this information, but what do you then DO with the information? :?:

are you going to be licensing the technology?

 

[bonj2]

tell me about the 'bucket'. Why bucket?

 

[magnatom]

:?:


Good work. All you need to do is get it in a decent box, give it a groovy name, get a CE mark, sort out marketing and mass manufacture, talk to suppliers and sell it to me for £4.49 (including postage, packaging and postal insurance).

I'll be interested to hear how you get on.....

 

[PrettyboyTim]

So it gives you this information, but what do you then DO with the information?

I'm interested to see how different my perception of how close people pass compares to reality.

are you going to be licensing the technology?

I've open-sourced the code. All 5K of it ;-)

 

[marinyork]

Looks fantastic as a piece of kit!

 

[upsidedown]

Could it activate the Airzound at a pre-programmed distance ?

 

[liambauckham]

whats with the huge spotlights and computer? looks like something the doc would ride

88.8mph

 

[AndyB]

That looks really interesting.

I had a thought that some kind of audio output could be useful.
You could encode the measured distance in either the frequency or number of beeps from a speaker. The sound would be picked up by the bike camera and so you would have a video log of the type of vehicle, the situation on the road when the pass happened along with the distance measurements encoded in the audio track for later analysis?

 

[PrettyboyTim]

Okay, so I tried it out this morning, but it seems to be returning measurements that are too small. I probably should have tested it home with a tape measure on Saturday. I'll try and debug it this evening.

 

[PrettyboyTim]

That looks really interesting.

I had a thought that some kind of audio output could be useful.
You could encode the measured distance in either the frequency or number of beeps from a speaker. The sound would be picked up by the bike camera and so you would have a video log of the type of vehicle, the situation on the road when the pass happened along with the distance measurements encoded in the audio track for later analysis?

Actually that was exactly what I was thinking. I bought a speech synthesis chip for that purpose but I never got around to integrating it. I think it also might be a better idea to just spool some speech samples from an eeprom.

I lost some of the motivation to go down that path after my bike cam gave up the ghost, but I'm pretty tempted by the flycamone2 though, so I might get back on it.

 

[Arch]

Okay, so I tried it out this morning, but it seems to be returning measurements that are too small. I probably should have tested it home with a tape measure on Saturday. I'll try and debug it this evening.

Yeah, I reckon if you've got a bug on the sensor, that would give you very close measurements...

Cool idea though... If you want to be depressed, try it here and then try it in France and watch it go "Was that a car? It was so far away, I couldn't see it properly..."...

 

[PrettyboyTim]

Hmm - well I couldn't find anything wrong with the code - some experiments with a tape measure showed the distances to be accurate. I've updated the code to show me the currently detected range as well as the recent closest range, so I'll see how it performs tomorrow.

I did have a problem with it resetting once when I bombed over a speed hump - I probably need to look at putting a different battery in it (the jog must have caused a momentary break in power).

 

[marinyork]

You got any published data yet?

 

[PrettyboyTim]

Oh, and I've updated the pictures page with some really terrible pictures I took on my phone.

Right, off to bed!