Project
| # | Title | Team Members | TA | Documents | Sponsor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 31 | Environment Aware Bike Light |
Guan Qin Hosang Chun Siddharth Sharma |
Anthony Caton | design_document0.pdf final_paper0.pdf presentation0.pptx proposal0.pdf |
|
| To be safe riding at night, bikers use bike lights to illuminate dark streets. The problem with bike lights in the market is that they do not offer enough environment awareness in order to influence their brightness. Not all streets are dark to the point where the biker needs full brightness. Some have street lights, so the light doesn't have to be as bright but it just needs to be bright enough to signal the biker's existence to other cars in the road. Similarly, adverse weather conditions such as rain pose problems in terms of visibility as well. Our idea is to add a photoresistor in the bike light that would control the brightness of the bike light. We would also add a sensor to detect rain and turn on the bike light as well as a low-battery alarm light in order to inform the owner when the bike light is running low on battery. This would provide a lot of flexibility in brightness for the bike riders while also ensuring their safety without loss of convenience. We have seen bike lights that adjust brightness accordingly to the velocity of the bike, but not any that adjust brightness accordingly to the surroundings. We’ll be taking a microcontroller approach. We’ll use an Arduino to prototype and we’ll move on to a PCB involving ATmega chip. The photoresistor will detect the surrounding brightness and will be passed onto a low-pass filter to remove flickers. The amplifier will amplify the signal to be within usable range for the microcontroller’s ADC to read and will use that filtered signal to power LEDs. The potentiometer will be used to control gain from the amplifier manually, so that the users can adjust brightness according to their taste. The voltage regulator will make sure that there’s sufficient voltage provided for all the components to function and a DC-DC converter to efficiently convert voltages. The brightness also will be increased if the rain is detected. The rain can be detected by an anti-oxidant conducting plate that changes its resistivity when in contact with water. This would go through the similar signal path as the photoresistor’s path. There also would be a low battery light that will light up if the battery is running low, reminding the user to change the battery. This would be done by checking the voltage of the battery by wiring into one of the ADCs of ATmega and checking the values of the ADC against a low value. |
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