Bike Buddy

View #1 of CAD for LCD, ESP32, & Button Mount Onto Bike
View #2 of CAD for LCD, ESP32, & Button Mount Onto Bike (how it would look from biker view)

Inspiration

Two of our group members bike to class every day, and we wanted to create an easier way to know not only where we are, but how fast we are travelling. This expanded into covering out bickering about who "truly bikes more" going to classes, and the Bike Buddy was born!

What it does

Measures your speed and mileage on a bike through GPS signal. The mileage recorded is then sent to a website which catalogs users' different miles biked in a week, allowing for competition!

How we built it

We coded an ESP-32 board to pull GPS positioning data from a ceramic satellite reader. From this, we could calculate the speed the user was travelling by comparing the distance travelled to the user's refresh rate. With further math, this could be used to calculate the user's travelled distance (mileage), which is then uploaded to a database which sorts users by highest distance travelled.

To get our location on a map, we then used this location data and pulled a live reading of Google Maps of the surrounding area, displaying the area for the user to view.

Challenges we ran into

The GPS module we had was too weak, and had problems finding GPS satellites to lock into to find our location, taking 20+ minutes to find a usable signal. To solve this, we connected our controller board to our phones' built in GPS, which is much higher quality.

We also accidentally designed our housing unit without considering space for a battery or button, and had to "post-process" our 3D print.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Finding out how to do the math to calculate the user's speed and mileage, the overall design and look of our project, and the low price of hardware we ended up using.