Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
8 Bicycle Street Notification System
Area Award: Transportation
 Anant Jani
Savannah Russell
Stephanie Wong
 Channing Philbrick final_paper0.pdf
presentation0.pptx
proposal0.pdf
video
The current street notification system for bicyclists includes using their hands and arms to notify other road users of their intentions to turn (left or right) or to stop. These signals are not used by all bikers, and many non-bikers do not know these signals exist or how to interpret them. This can create confusion on the road and lead to accidents that could easily be prevented if bikes had a notification system like cars do to indicate turning, braking, and hazards in case of emergency.

We want to create a bicycle light system that includes left and right turn signals, a brake light, and hazard light system. The left and right lights will use LEDs in arrow shaped housing, and will be placed on both the front and the back of the bike. They will be controlled through switches on their respective handlebars with the additional feature that they will turn off once an optic sensors detects that the turn has been completed. The brake light will be located on the back of the bike and will be controlled using a pressure sensor at the left and right brakes on the handles. The hazard light system will have the four turn signals and the brake light flash on and off, and will be turned on and off using both the left and right turn signal switches. To power the systems, we proposed charging a battery using solar power. An extra feature of our bike system would be to implement a speedometer using magnets and the PCB board to display the speed on a small display on the handlebars.

While there are bike light systems already in existence, ours can be considered unique because of the inclusion of the flashing hazard lights, the automatic turn-off once the bike has completed its turn, as well as using solar to power the system.

Wireless IntraNetwork

Daniel Gardner, Jeeth Suresh

Wireless IntraNetwork

Featured Project

There is a drastic lack of networking infrastructure in unstable or remote areas, where businesses don’t think they can reliably recoup the large initial cost of construction. Our goal is to bring the internet to these areas. We will use a network of extremely affordable (<$20, made possible by IoT technology) solar-powered nodes that communicate via Wi-Fi with one another and personal devices, donated through organizations such as OLPC, creating an intranet. Each node covers an area approximately 600-800ft in every direction with 4MB/s access and 16GB of cached data, saving valuable bandwidth. Internal communication applications will be provided, minimizing expensive and slow global internet connections. Several solutions exist, but all have failed due to costs of over $200/node or the lack of networking capability.

To connect to the internet at large, a more powerful “server” may be added. This server hooks into the network like other nodes, but contains a cellular connection to connect to the global internet. Any device on the network will be able to access the web via the server’s connection, effectively spreading the cost of a single cellular data plan (which is too expensive for individuals in rural areas). The server also contains a continually-updated several-terabyte cache of educational data and programs, such as Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg. This data gives students and educators high-speed access to resources. Working in harmony, these two components foster economic growth and education, while significantly reducing the costs of adding future infrastructure.