Intelligent Deterrence
Engineering, design and development, whether or not related to the BikeMinder.ca product.
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 […]
The photo shows assorted boards, including the early, RFID-based authentication that the system was using. There are at least two different RFID boards in this.
A faint attempt at lazily, quickly getting an idea of how much of an effect a horn could have on loudness: It had an effect, but with the expected loss in quality. The loudness was far from enough, anyway.
A collection of some of the various speakers tried in the years-long pursuit to achieve loudness at the smallest possible size. Note that, initially, the goal was to design a system that could fit inside a bike frame! That had many ‘impossibles’ to overcome, the hardest of which was loudness. Even when the design changed […]
A June 2017 test. It seems to be a surface transducer being tested on a tin can–in this case, a Nellie’s laundry detergent’s–to check for improved loudness. IIRC all such tests failed to impress me. And they were indoors!
This was a test to see what riding away would appear like, to the system. The electronics were placed in a shoe box, atop a bike trailer. The laptop rests on some padding, IIRC, in order to make things a bit more difficult for the system. The bike then rode away.
This seems to be a SAMD20 board (which IIRC is the only 32-bit CPU I ever tried for this product), possibly with a bno055. I think it was an accelerometer/gyro/whatsit I was testing back then.
This was one of the early experiments with playing a human voice. The shot was taken on 8 April 2017. It was a Nuvoton board, I recall.
Over the past few years, I tried a number of different micro-controllers to design the system with. It started with an Arduino Uno, then went into different sizes and capabilities until it ended up in a different Atmel AVR. Now, with the project nearing completion, Covid has put a stop to completion of the design. […]
