Planet Arduino

Fabio Antonini loves to ride his bike, and while nearly all bike computers offer information such as cadence, distance, speed, and elevation, they lack the ability to tell if the cyclist is sitting or standing at any given time. So, after doing some research, he came across an example project that utilized Edge Impulse and an Arduino Nano 33 BLE 33 Sense’s onboard accelerometer to distinguish between various kinds of movements. Based on this previous work, he opted to create his own ML device using the same general framework. 

Over the course of around 20 minutes, Fabio collected data for both standing and sitting by strapping a Nano 33 BLE Sense to his arm and connecting it to a laptop. Once the data had been processed and fed through a training algorithm, his freshly minted model was then deployed back to the board for real-time processing. 

The program Antonini made classifies incoming data from the IMU into one of four different states: seated on a plain, seated on an uphill, jumping on the pedals during an uphill, or pushing on a sprint while on a plain. From here, the built-in RGB LED changes its color to notify the user of what was inferred.

You can read more about the creation process and usage of this project here in Antonini’s Medium blog post.

The post This Arduino device knows how a bike is being ridden using tinyML appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Why should cyclists have all of the fancy toys? Bicycle computers are very common these days but you won’t find similar hardware for skateboards and longboards. [KobraX22] isn’t taking it lying down. He built this speed and distance computer for his longboard. It doesn’t use very many components and should be easy to install.

The device monitors the rotation of one of the wheels by mounting a reflectance sensor on one of the trucks. It points toward the inside of a wheel which has a piece of black tape on it. Every time the tape passes it prevents the IR led from reflecting back at its paired receiver. This lets the Arduino count the revolutions, which are then paired with the wheel diameter to calculate speed as well as distance traveled. Of course the wheels wear down over time to so frequent riders will have to take new measurements at regular intervals.

[KobraX22] went with a QRB1114 sensor. It costs less than $2 and doesn’t require him to embed a magnet in the wheel like a hall effect sensor setup would have. It also shouldn’t interfere with any other fancy wheel hacks you’ve done, like adding a POV display.

[via Reddit]