The Story: Doing it the hard way
If you would only recognize that life is hard, things would be so much easier for you.
Louis D. Brandeis
There is a time when we desire to try something new, and I guess after trying so many things with the software, it is time to try to mix between the physical and virtual parts.
This was possible after I bought my second bike in 2013 and I wanted to design a system for it so I began exploring the embedded systems field. I always dreamt to design things like Jimmy Neutron did, I wanted to design my smartwatch, my lab… And I guess that this was my ultimate opportunity to prove that, so I started looking at ways to implement my personal smart bike system.
I came across the micro-controllers world (PIC, ATMEGA…) so I focused on building a board from scratch, I picked ATMEGA328P because it was available in Tunis and there were a lot of resources supporting it.
The system that I wanted to design was a smart bike, that had a speedometer that uses the magnetic switch to calculate speed, it controls the lighting system of the bike, all information is centralized on a phone screen, the bike calculates the brake distance and alerts you, it also has a log and music player.
I designed the circuit with ISIS Proteus 7 and i coded the firmware with ATMEL Studio. the code for project is available here.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t implement the system because I lacked the hardware and the budget to make it happen, so I managed to make a basic one.
Failure should always push you rather than stop you.
To be continued…
