UpWright

Logo (made by my girlfriend, Amanda)

Inspiration

I was inspired to create UpWright by my parents, who would worry about me cycling outside as a young child alone. They wouldn't know if I would fall down. However, independence is a good skill for young children, so I opted to make an Arduino project that would notify a parent if their child falls.

What it does

UpWright uses two Arduino modules (receiver and transmitter) to communicate orientation and angular speed of the first module to the second. The second has LEDs to alert the parent if their child falls over. The primary module (in production) would be strapped to a child's bike to provide them safety within a roughly 1000m radius. The primary uses I2C to communicate with its MPU6050 IMU and then relay the data back to the board. From there, the data is sent over 2.4Ghz ISM band to the address of the secondary. The secondary will then flash a red LED to signify that a child needs assistance.

How I built it

I used Arduino to build this project!

What I learned

Essentially how to do stuff with Arduino. I'd done a bit of work with C before, but using C++ with the Arduino API was a bit of a new thing for me. I had also never done any work with MPU6050 boards or the NRF24L01.

What's next for UpWright

In the future, I think I would consider making an actual production case. At the moment, it's just bare circuitry (partially due to the time frame and also my lack of a 3d printer), but ideally it would be in a small compartment in the area that a saddle bag goes on a bike.

Another weak feature of the project was the actual boards used. Truthfully, I used an Arduino Mega mostly because I wanted to have extra IO in case the project evolved, but I could have easily just used two Arduino Nanos. Further than that, production microcontrollers are often single-write to minimize costs. It likely would be much more economical to simply design one board with the microcontroller board, MPU6050, and NRF24L01 all together.

In addition, I think the way I notified the 'parent' in the demo was perhaps simple but not overly reasonable for actual usage. If your child falls over, you likely want a push notification on your phone or an automated call to get your attention quickly. For me, it quickly went out of the scale of things required simply for a working demo, but implementing this would be ideal.

The last thing I think I would improve with more time is the range. The NRF25L01+ PA/LNA module I used has a range of 1000m approximately, but I don't see that as being viable from a product standpoint. Realistically, making this product a good one would require hundreds of kilometers in range, so it could be marketed to adult cyclists as well as children.