I may still be waiting for my 3D printer to arrive, but in the mean time, the components for my HUD were waiting in the mail box today!
It included a Rasberry Pi model 3 B, an Adafruit Feather Bluefruit (bluetooth enabled Feather development board) and some headers for the Bluefruit.
So now I’m ready to push forward with this project and get the electronics finalised. Once the 3D printer arrives, then I can start working on housings for the electronics. Lots to plan and lots to do!
There is something about Englishmen and going REALLY fast. They seem to be very good at it. Both the engineering involved in building land speed record cars and driving them.
The current land speed record is held by Andy Green, driving the ThrustSSC (that’s: SuperSonic Car) and yes, ThrustSSC did break the sound barrier on land on four wheels with an average speed over one mile in two passes of 1227.986 km/h. Any way you look at it, that’s insanely fast.
Not content with that, Richard Noble, who lead the ThrustSCC team, is now aiming for 1000 mph (1600 km/h) with his next project Bloodhound SSC.
But now Triumph, with the help of Isle of Man legend Guy Martin, are aiming to push the motorcycle land speed record from 376.363 mph to 400 mph with the Triumph Infor Rocket. So once again English engineering and pilot are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
I read the Triumph Infor Rocket in Wired Magazine online. You can see the article here.
Specs for this insane motorcycle:
That is one very, very serious bike – and it’s a Triumph! I have a special soft spot for this land speed record attempt, as I ride a Triumph myself – a 2004 Daytona 955i. It would be great to see Triumph take back a title that they haven’t held since the Triumph powered Gyronaut X-1 set a land speed record of 395.363 km/h in 1966 – that’s 50 years ago.
Here’s hoping that the Rocket and Guy Martin can do it.
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:
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.
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.
