Bike Dashboard

Inspiration

One day, my friends and I decided to do the ISU hackathon. After brainstorming, Kevin landed on the idea of creating a dashboard that displays time, speed, and distance traveled on a bike ride.

What it does

Our project displays distance, speed, and time of the bike on an LCD display.

How we built it

In order to count the spokes on the bike, we used an IR LED and an IR photoreceptor to detect an interruption. These sensors are located on the back wheel. We then connected this to the arduino by way of a breadboard housed under the bike seat. Using the spoke count, our program then computed distance by multiplying a spoke to circumference ratio. To calculate time, we used the arduino's built in timer.

Challenges we ran into

We were going to implement a pebble display for our dashboard, but it turned out that without a bluetooth shield for the arduino we could not transmit our data to the pebble. Therefore, we removed the pebble from our project. We also ran into a problem where our lcd display would randomly stop working. After spending multiple hours troubleshooting, we discovered that we had soldered a bad connection onto the LCD panel. We eventually replaced it with a new one.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

After discovering that our IR receiver and transmitter system was too sensitive (It was oscillating interrupts on the edge of the beam) we added a new condition to our code. This condition stated that if there was multiple interrupts between a certain time period, then it would only count one of those interrupts. This length of time was based off a hypothetical max speed of a bike being 30 mph. Also, we are pretty proud of our project considering none of us had ever worked with hardware before.

What we learned

We learned soldering skills, circuitry, arduino programming, and lots and lots of troubleshooting.

What's next for Bike Dashboard

We hope to integrate the bike dashboard with a smart watch in the future. This way the user would not need to mount the dashboard to the bike, and instead open the app on their watch and keep track of their stats that way.