Electrical mods - ideas wanted

Originally Posted by skumlerud

Are you saying that the gear position sensor on the pointy will detect all gears? That's very interesting, especially if the sensor will fit a curvy!

You could pretty easily make a similar sensor & mount it to the gear shaft.

A simple counter really, move the mecahical connections one way (anti-clockwise around the shaft?), and decrement a byte value. Move the other way & increment the same value.

That's all that happens inside the ECU of the pointy, though I can't remember where the sensor lives.

Not sure if you could incorporate this, but a lean angle sensor / indicator would be really cool - a bit like they show sometimes on the moto gp TV coverage.

you could make an alarm into it also? 12v waterproof sirens are cheap, all you'd need is a tilt sensor, which basically require 12v input, ground and then the last wire connets to earth when tilted. you could then use things like the ignition on input as a signal etc.. if you want more info let me know as I fit car alarms back here in the UK and know a bit about it..
and btw, airbag systems have been using a canbus style system for years but theres is MUCH more advanced that the type that run lighting etc.. some of the cars with 18 airbags etc now will only fire the airbags that will help the people inside to help reduce the rebuild costs if the car is a write off.

Originally Posted by sparkymarky

Not sure if you could incorporate this, but a lean angle sensor / indicator would be really cool - a bit like they show sometimes on the moto gp TV coverage.

It would be easy to implement, but quite useless as you really don't want to be looking at the dash while leaned over I might connect an accelerometer though (for activating the brakelight. I'm currently investigating various accelerometers.), so I could display the G-forces without any extra effort.

Originally Posted by carsounds_dan

you could make an alarm into it also? 12v waterproof sirens are cheap, all you'd need is a tilt sensor, which basically require 12v input, ground and then the last wire connets to earth when tilted. you could then use things like the ignition on input as a signal etc..

That would be pretty easy, as long as there's enough available inputs on the microcontroller. It has 14 digital inputs/outputs and 6 analog inputs, and so far I'm using 19 pins. So there's one left, which I guess isn't enough for an alarm. I'm investigating another way of interfacing with the LCD which might free up two pins though.

An alarm would make an interesting stand-alone project though. It's possible to monitor tilt angle, G-forces, battery voltage, sound, movement and even if someone just touch your bike. I know very little about alarms though, and you might even be able to purchase such an alarm for little money. Building it using a Freeduino and some sensors would probably cost about £40-50.

Just an update:
I've pretty much finished the software, but I won't be able to test it on the bike for a while yet. In the meantime I'm going to switch to a much more powerful microcontroller, which will enable me to add more features and save space. I've also ordered a couple of really fancy displays, which hopefully will let me design a really cool speedo/tach/dash.