Sycle

Experience the world with your bike. Everything you need to start cycling better.

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Inspiration

Cambridgeshire has the highest rate of cycle thefts in the country and the police often has insufficient time and resources to solve every case. Our product will help reduce the number of bike thefts, reducing burden on the police, while improving the overall user experience. Our inspirations were the Fitbit, modern home security systems and the If This Then That (IFTTT) app.

What it does

Functionalities: Two modes available (triggered via buttons on mbed cloud connect device) - parking mode and cycling mode Alerts user when their bike is stolen, tracks the movement of the bike via real-time accelerometer plots, reminds the user to bring bike lights when it's dark, calculates and displays the gradient of the road in real time for mountain biking, locates the bike on request.

How I built it

Created a python server that communicates with the mbed Cloud Connect device via HTTP requests and processes the data, for example to produce real time graphs of the accelerometer readings and the pitch and roll angles of the bike in motion. When certain events such as when the bike might be getting stolen, it is too cold etc, happen, the python server sends http requests to an applet created with IFTTT which sends emails and notifications to the user's phone. A GUI desktop app was also created, which displays the temperature, humidity, accelerometer graph, air quality and the mode of operation.

Challenges I ran into

Networking issues, the algorithm to calculate when the bike is being stolen, threading issues with GUI

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Working with mbed os, the final product

What I learned

How to create a server in Python, the numerous capabilities of the mbed cloud connect device

What's next for Sycle

For implementation in real life, a powerpack and 4G module would be required. For large scale use, the police could be notified if there is suspected theft of many bikes in a specific street are being stolen. We would add ways to verify certain things before notifications are sent.

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