aHead

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  Helmet's warning-lights showing

Inspiration

Our teammate, Blake, fell off his bicycle and broke his foot. We wanted to build something that would make bicyclists, like Blake, safer.

What it does

• Flashes at the car when cars get too close for comfort (activated by Lidar)

• Alerts the rider (via the visor) when objects approach

• Turn-signal (activated by head-gestures)

• Brake-lights (activated by decelerations)

• Headlight (activated by darkness)

• Background lighting for increased visibility

How we built it

We dremeled out the helmet to make a place for the circuitry, the battery bank, and the sensors. Then we attached everything, wired it, and programmed it.

Challenges we ran into

We wrote multithreaded software to continuously poll from multiple sensors. We had to work around deadlocks and race-conditions in shared memory with concurrent asynchronous programming techniques.

Getting the components wired was difficult to debug, especially with the wiring on the helmet.

Extracting meaningful data from the noisy gyro was difficult.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Getting all of the sensors and LEDs to work, which required multiple protocols (I2C, PWM, analog)

• Getting all of the components and cables to fit in the helmet comfortably.

What we learned

• Multithreaded, asynchronous, concurrent programming

• Bus protocols like I2C

• Cable management

What's next for aHead up

• Use accelerometer to detect a crash and optionally text emergency services or a loved one.

• Connect with GPS

  • Show the route you travelled.
  • Identify traffic spots from peers.

Built With

• arduino
• hardware
• lidar
• python
• raspberry-pi