Marcelo and I both like to cycle quite a bit but in a city like Toronto that can be quite dangerous at times. There’s traffic coming from all directions and the hand signals can be misleading and also for a novice biker like myself hard to actually do.
We instead created a bike helmet that would indicate where we would like to turn as well as when we would be stopping by simply nodding your head in the direction you’d like to turn. We used the NeoPixel ring as our means of communication and an accelerometer mounted on top of a helmet as the input.
Background Research:
According to the Toronto Police, over 500 cyclists were involved in collisions between June and September of this year alone, which is about 4-5 collisions a day.The assumption we do make is that most accidents might happen at night or during low visibility. We wanted to try and understand this problem a bit better and suggest a simple solution. After a bit of digging around, we found a Kickstarter project which is looking into the same problem called “Lumos“.
We created a simple code which uses the NeoPixel library to indicate left and right in green, red for stop and blue for on and we even did a quick test of it outside.
By Leon Lu and Marcelo Luft
