Tag Archives: GPS

Motorcycle helmet HUD – 2

Ok, today has been an interesting day for discoveries.  I was thinking about the limitations of having to have a wired connection between the helmet and main unit on the bike and it got me thinking about Bluetooth and wireless options.

The first thing I discovered (which I wasn’t aware of) is that basic Bluetooth modules (and slave and master pair) can be readily inserted in place of a serial connection between devices.  Unfortunately I don’t think that this would work in the case of driving the Neopixel LED strip that I am planning on using for speed display, but it did point me in the right direction.

What I found was the Adafruit Feather 32u4 Bluefruit LE Arduino development board:

https://www.adafruit.com/products/2829

It’s a fully functional Arduino single board computer with the following features:

  • Size: 51mm x 23mm x 8mm
  • USB powered
  • Built in lithium ion polymer battery charger (!)
  • Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy module
  • Heaps of GPIO pins

And it’s cheap (USD$30).  All of this makes it perfect for controlling the LED strip.  It’s small, batter powered, low power consumption, has Bluetooth for communication, and is perfect for controlling LEDs.

I have ordered one to play with and get a feel for Arduino (which I haven’t used before).  So my Raspberry Pi 3 B (which also has Bluetooth 4.0 support) should be able to talk directly to the Feather and issue commands about what light pattern to display.

This means that the helmet components just got more complex, but it should be worth the hassle to have a wire free connection.

Motorcycle helmet HUD – 1

This is an old project that I am finally getting back to, with the hope of completing.

I have ridden motorcycles for nearly twenty years, and being tall (6’2″) means that on all of the bikes that I have owned, the instrument cluster is out of my line of site – usually obscured by the chin guard of my helmet (and there is absolutely no way known that I will ever wear an open face helmet).

This is a problem, because it means that I have to frequently take my eyes off the road to check that I am not exceeding the speed limit – something ridiculously easy to do on a modern sports bike.

My solution, which I prototyped over a year ago uses a GPS receiver connected to a Raspberry Pi single board computer, and a stick of RGB LEDs to give a visual indication of speed in the rider’s peripheral vision, where each LED lit corresponds to a speed band (40 to 50kms, 50 to 60kms etc).  The prototype also has an LCD screen and a Raspberry Pi camera that down the track I want to use for automatic speed zone detection (using a convolutional neural network for speed sign identification) but that’s a bigger project for another time.

The prototype worked in stationary testing, but I never got the chance to do testing in a vehicle and the Raspberry Pi has since been scavenged for the Heat Recovery Ventilator project, so I really need to buy another one.

So this is a project that definitely needs to be revived.  I have been off the bike for a while, but did a long trip recently and got thinking about it again seeing all of the police on the road and really missing having cruise control!

Stay tuned.  More to come.