Samsung Smart Bike MCUs For Your Bike

Bikes present a wide range of opportunities to use microcontrollers to improve your riding or at least give you a new experience. This posts briefly looks at a few of those opportunities.

Samsung Smart Bike

Tonights collection of bike related MCU projects and ideas was prompted by reading "Samsung Smart Bike packs an Arduino and frickin’ laser beams," a June 12 post in Geek.com. Geeks post said:

"Samsung’s been working on a concept bike in conjunction with Maestros Academy...For the smart bike in particular, the design team wanted to help reduce the number of cyclists involved in accidents each year...Front and center (literally) on the bike is a magnetic smartphone mount. Slap on your Galaxy phone and fire up the app to control the bike’s systems. There’s onboard LED lighting for nighttime riding and a rearview camera so you can safely keep tabs on traffic as it approaches from behind — video is streamed to your bike-mounted phone. And then there’s the four bike-mounted lasers. The lasers on Samsung’s bike aren’t designed to take out incoming foes...They’re part of the bike’s safety system. Fire them up, and a virtual bike lane gets projected onto the roadway to make sure motorists give you enough room to

ride...How does the bike communicate with your phone? It’s hiding the maker’s secret weapon, an Arduino, which gets paired via Bluetooth. The Samsung app also

Laser bike lane concept

does the typical social fitness stuff. You can track your rides and share them with other smart bike users, see where other people are riding, and even keep tabs on how many people are riding the same path as you in real time."

The Samsung Smart Bike is just one type of MCU-bike project. Using MCUs on bikes can be divided into five categories:

1. MCUs improving biking experience but not connected to the bike
2. Bike-connected MCUs for independent projects
3. MCUs integrating multiple biking features
4. MCUs connected to bike and to smartphone
5. MCU-controlled e-bikes

Numerous MCU posts could be written about each of the above categories of bike-mcu combos. For tonights post well just briefly descibe each category and mention related projects or webpage links.

Flora brake light backpack

The first category, bike-related MCUs which arent bike-connected, covers items like this Arduino blinking bike patch backpack, this Flora brake light backpack or this jacket which uses an Arduino to light up an arrow or other rider-visibility features. The MCU in these projects arent actually connected to the bike or integrated into its functioning, but they do create a better riding experience.

The second category, bike-connected MCUs for independent projects covers items like the bike speedometer from Instructables or some of the Arduino-bike projects from the Intro to

Bike speedometer

Arduino Pimp My Bike series. To find a specific bike-mcu project youre interested in, just Google for  bike Arduino [or microcontroller] xxxxx, where xxxxx is the topic or type of bike feature or function in which you are interested.

MCUs integrating multiple biking features includes projects like this bike dashboard Instructables which integrates a lighting system and a speedometer. An Arduino or other MCU system can control a wide variety of sensors and outputs, so you could include front and back-illuminating LEDs or lasers, blinking LEDs for turn indication, photosensors to automatically turn on your bike lights and lots of other physical computing features that are functional, cool or both.

Bike dashboard

The fourth category, MCUs connected to the bike and a smartphone have a huge upside for innovation and benefit in the next five to ten years as smartphones add sensors and computing power and as MCUs continue to become more powerful. This category includes projects like the Samsung Smart Bike. The MCU controls and communicates with a wide variety of devices and sensors, and the smartphone can easily connect your bike with the internet and with your friends or other bikers.

MCU-controlled e-bikes represents the largest financial impact of MCUs on biking to-date. China has been a huge market for e-bikes because of the size of the population, the low cost transportation provided by e-bikes and the effort to reduce or minimize pollution caused by gas or diesel vehicle engines. Here are two e-bike overview PDFs; a Samsung application note "Electric Bike Controller System" and a Texas Instruments application report "Hardware Design Considerations for an Electric Bicycle Using a BLDC Motor."

What type of MCU-bike project would you like to work on with the Humboldt Microcontrollers Group? Come to the next meeting, tomorrow night, Thursday, August 21, at 1385 8th Street, Arcata, California, and discuss that project with the MCU group.

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Arc Controller Motor Shield More Power!!

The August 21 article "Arduino Motor Shield, Arc-Controller Launched By Arc Robotics" gave me a good reason to do a little research on microcontroller (MCU) motor control and motor shields.

Arc-Controller motor shield

The article covers the Arc-Controller, a new high capacity motor shield that has a Kickstarter campaign in progress, telling us:

"Maker, developers and hobbyists that enjoy building Arduino platform based projects might be interested in a new Arduino Motor Shield called the Arc controller which has been created by Arc Robotics...“There have been a lot of amazing projects come out of the Maker revolution, however, many are limited by the capability of their motor controller. We want to change that. The Arc-Controller is a bridge to bring high Amp motor control to your projects, up to 43 amps with a heat sink. It is capable of variable speed and direction control over a single Stepper Motor or two DC motors, because when do you only need one motor. The Arc-Controller is compatible with about any Arduino, or other micro controller such as Raspberry Pi. It runs an ATMega328, and is user programmable via the Arduino IDE."

The Kickstarter campaign still has 36 days to go, but it has gotten off to a very slow start, with only $927 pledged of the $41,500 funding goal. According to the Arc-Controller Kickstarter page,

"The Arc-Controller built around two H-Bridges. Each one can supply 43 amps of continuous current, with a properly mounted heat shield. The dual H-Bridges run separately, controlling two high-end DC Motors or as one controlling a single stepper motor. Built into the H-Bridges are current and temperature fail-safes.  If they begin to get too hot, or if they exceed the maximum current levels, current limiting will take affect. They will automatically shut down until they cool off, or until conditions are safe to operate. We also have included a reverse polarity protection...There is an integrated circuit on board that gives a current reading from the H-Brides to see how much current each individual motor is using. This gives you the option to write your sketches to react under certain loads, detect shorts and over heating states...We are creating a simple library that can be used to easily send commands to the Arc Controller. These commands can configure the Arc Controller to run a stepper motor, drive two brushed DC motors, and even an integrated an XY thumb stick “Arcade Drive”. The interface library will take input from you and transmit it to any number of connected Arc Controllers...We have had lots of success with tank style robots to the point that we made it run on two wheels until you want it to act like a tank. then it will lay down and drive like a tank. We have many theoretical uses, that we are eager to try such as: home made Segways, drive-by-wire go-karts, RC lawn mowers..."

There are a fair number of existing motor controllers for Arduinos if the Arc-Controller is overkill

for your needs. Here is a sampling of whats available for Arduino:

Adafruit motor shield V2

1. Adafruit Motor Shield V2 for Arduino -- $19.95 -- "We kept the ability to drive up to 4 DC motors or 2 stepper motors, but added many improvements...Instead of a L293D darlington driver, we now have the TB6612 MOSFET driver: with 1.2A per channel and 3A peak current capability. It also has much lower voltage drops across the motor so you get more torque out of your batteries...Instead of using a latch and the Arduinos PWM pins, we have a fully-dedicated PWM driver chip onboard. This chip handles all the motor and speed controls over I2C...5 address-select pins means up to 32 stackable shields: thats 64 steppers or 128 DC motors!"
2. Pololu Dual MC33926 Motor Driver Shield for Arduino -- $29.95 -- "This shield makes it easy to control two brushed DC motors with your Arduino or Arduino-compatible board. Its dual MC33926 motor drivers operate from 5 to 28 V and can deliver a continuous 3 A per motor. These great drivers also offer current-sense feedback and accept ultrasonic PWM frequencies for quieter operation."
3. Ardumoto - Motor Driver Shield -- $24.95 -- "This is a motor shield for Arduino that will

   

   Ardumotor from SparkFun

   control two DC motors. Based on the L298 H-bridge, the Ardumoto can drive up to 2 amps per channel. The board takes its power from the same Vin line as the Arduino board, includes blue and yellow LEDs to indicate active direction, and all driver lines are diode protected from back EMF."
4. Monster Moto Shield -- $69.95 -- "This is essentially a ramped up version of our Ardumoto motor driver shield. For this monster shield we’ve replaced the L298 H-bridge with a pair of VNH2SP30 full-bridge motor drivers. We’ve also beefed up the support circuitry so this board is capable of driving a pair of high-current motors!"
5. EasyDriver Stepper Motor Driver -- $14.95 -- "The EasyDriver is a simple to use stepper motor driver, compatible with anything that can output a digital 0 to 5V pulse (or 0 to 3.3V pulse if you solder SJ2 closed on the EasyDriver). EasyDriver requires a 7V to 20V supply to power the motor and can power any voltage of stepper motor."

If you use large motors or lots of motors on your MCU projects and could really use the Arc-Controller, you may want to head over to their Kickstarter page and support their campaign. If you know of other motor shields that do pretty much the same thing, send an email to arcatabob (at) gmail {dott} com and let me know what you use or recommend, and Ill update the post with that info.

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