Intelligent Deterrence
The history of the Minder1 product.
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 […]
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 […]
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.
