As outlined in some of the history of the Minder1 theft-deterrent for bicycles, the original hope was to mount the system inside the bicycle frame. Chief among the consequent problems was the difficulty of achieving loudness. The latter is determinative in the current (autumn 2021) size and mounting-point of the system. But it is not […]
With prices for off-the-shelf enclosures having risen, and supplies dwindling, I’ve had to consider making my own. Yet again! I’d started off by naively thinking of local, custom production. And the obligatory 3D-printing. Then, I ended up researching metal fabrication–even welding! The current focus is on sheet metal. All the going-around-in-circles eventually bore fruit: Riveting […]
As already outlined, my only recourse for an affordable enclosure for the product has been an off-the-shelf metal can. Simply, custom manufacturing would result in a cost of hundreds of dollars per enclosure, unless if I order ten(s) thousand of it! The product’s enclosure has to meet some basic requirements. It has to: And whatever […]
When an electronics circuit is validated on a bread-board, the next stage may be to build it on a padboard. For commercialization (i.e. to turn it into a mass-produced product), this is turned into a PCB. This is what you’d typically see in a product that has electronics within it. (There is also IC/chips fabrication, […]
The supply crisis has created obstacle after obstacle for creation of the electronics’ PCB. Simply, there are very few ICs to be found. Whichever PCB fabricator I approach is missing some component or other. Suppliers are out of stock on some major parts of the Minder 1 circuit. What little stock might exist has shot […]
The great Karim Yaghmour reflects upon what I’ve ended up going through: there is an enormous difference between cooking up a project using a standard dev board like an Arduino and self-printing a case for it, and actually charting a path to creating a finished product that can be mass-produced, marketed and supported. Karim Yaghmour. […]
I’ve had to learn more about angle grinders than I’d ever wanted to know! I have to run various tests of the system, using an angle grinder. (Saws, bolt cutters etc will also be in the attacks/threats tested.) For now, a basic, brief test is to be carried out, showing a snippet of the system’s […]
A lot of time was spent, over the (2+?) years, to find a way of generating loudness via the bike frame. While this is very possible, it will not be a commercial product, installable by average consumers. And frame modifications are never a desirable option! 🙂
Back in June 2016, when this whole thing started, my idea was to place the system within a bike’s frame. This caused numerous problems, which I will outline in future posts, as time permits. Below is shown a photo of one of the August 2017 tests. Literally hanging by a thread is a speaker or […]
The loudness journey started with Class D amplifiers, due to their low power consumption. But, aside from loudness never quite being sufficient, I had various problems–noise, and perhaps occasional deaths, being chief among them. Eventually, I moved to power amplifiers. But, given the size constraints on the speakers, and the outdoor noise that was to […]
