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.