Monthly Archives: February 2017

Motorcycle helmet HUD – 4

It’s been a while since I did any work on this project, but I pulled out the components the other day and started to look into the Bluetooth connection between the Raspberry Pi and the Feather 32u4 Bluefruit LE board.

It turns out to be complex and on the whole not very well explained how to make these devices talk to each other.  In the final analysis it’s not actually that hard – but you have to do a lot of reading and educate yourself about Bluetooth LE (low energy) before you can actually Make Stuff Happen (TM).

And when you do there are a few limitations that you have to get your head around – like very small data packets.  So no sending long strings for instance.  And then there’s Services and Characteristics and Notification.  Most documenation is far to low level.  Or, if it’s higher level, then it’s vague and poorly explained.

Anyway.  Two days later and I have absorbed – almost – enough Bluetooth LE lore to be able to start to do useful things.  I have achieved connection and data transfer and am working on creating a service that will ultimately allow the Raspberry Pi to send enough data to the Feather board that it will be able to work out how to update the Neopixel strip to correctly reflect current speed.

Progress is happening.

A local supplier of Adafruit components in Australia

If you are thinking of buying Adafruit components like the ones I regularly use in my projects and you don’t want to pay for, or wait for shipping from the US then you are in luck!

I recently discovered that you can order Adafruit components from Core Electronics in Australia.  They claim to stock the entire range of Adafruit components.

You can find them here:

https://core-electronics.com.au/

AI is coming to design and engineering

There is one thing in life that you can count on: AI is going to be bigger and happen sooner than almost any of us expect.

Autonomous cars are perhaps the most visible implementations of AI, but it’s creeping in everywhere.  From personal assistants (Sirri, Cortana, Alexa etc), to administration jobs (IBM’s Watson), and now – design and engineering.  Have a look at this article about a team who have applied machine learning to automotive design:

http://www.drive.com.au/motor-news/how-artificial-intelligence-could-design-your-next-car-20170228-gumxy6.html

From the article:

The first Hack Rod prototype created using generative design resulted in a chassis that is 35 per cent lighter than the team’s engineers first managed.

Just let that sink in: on its first try the AI software managed to reduce the weight of a human designed chassis by 35%.

That is unbelievable.  Gains of a few percentage points are what you expect in professional design and manufacturing.  Not 35%.  And this isn’t a design that you can look at and say “Well, ok, now that I have seen it, I could do it too”.  No, this is design that is entirely beyond human ability to ever conceive.

As a deisgner that’s scary – and amazing.

For now we are still in charge of this process.  Controlling and guiding every aspect of it.  However, I can easily imagine a time in the future when an entirely automated, AI guided system can design, build, and operate a fleet of autonomous vehicles, continually monitoring the performance data of the fleet to optimise the physical performance, the satisfaction level of customers to optimise the aesthetics and comfort, and tweaking each new batch of 3D printed cars to improve over the last batch.  No human guidance necessary.

And this isn’t some nebulous, far future, pie-in-the-sky idea.  The pieces are coming together to make this possible very, very quickly.  The McLaren Technology Group already know how to monitor and analyse vehicle performance to the Nth degree.  Market research and analysis of consumer behaviour is what every single company on earth does to some degree or other.  The only missing bit is for AI to tie all of these function together.

The consequences of such a system – economic, social, and political are literally unimaginable at this time.

But the writing is on the wall.  It’s coming.  It’s not going to be stopped.