Cycling UK Forum

I have had such bad results with any painting I have ever attempted to do that I eventually just gave in and even painted my car with standard metal paint and a brush - lol

But recently I watched this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7onZGqrYyY&t=482s
I wish I had seen this video many years ago as I strongly suspect that this answers why I have never had any success.

BTW - The whole series of videos is well worth a watch

This article by Big Clive on his experience of using a GPS tracker may be of interest/use?
http://bigclive.com/gps.htm

These page may be of use/interest:

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/family/death-plan/

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/famil ... eap-wills/

btw - Don't know if it is happening this year but usually you can get one cheap in November
https://www.willaid.org.uk/

tatanab wrote:I have a hankering after one as well, but I have no ide what I could possibly do with it. In the 70s I built my own memory extensions for ZX81, I also built a Nascom (19" rack which also contained a stripped down ZX81 connected to a remote keyboard). I never did get that Nascom working, I don't think I tried hard enough. I think you can see that my interest lay in the hardware, building and adapting, I never got to grips with anything else. It probably will not stop me buying one, with no idea why, and eventually filing it away with my other "projects".

I think the Raspberry Pi 400 is great, what they should have produced in the start as the standard Raspberry Pi requires so much additional equipment etc. to get up and running especially for a beginner, but they always seem to be too expensive for what they are to me.

With your diy electronics interest you might be interested in getting an Arduino type board as they make dabbling in electronics and programming pretty simple and great fun. I used to do a lot of programming etc. back in the 80s on my trusty Vic-20 and I think the Arduino re-captured my interest in this type of thing.
Arduino type boards are amazingly cheap and I think amazing what you can do with them without having to be an electronics/programming expert.
e.g. You can get an esp32 for under £5 on eBay which has built in wifi, blutooth and a surprisingly powerful processor.
Add to this a relay board for around £1, connect 3 wires between it and the esp32 and you can build yourself a wifi controlled "smart switch".

Hi,

The protected 18650 cells have a small circuit board attached on the end (you can usually tell them as they are slightly longer than a bare 18650) which cuts the power if it detects it is getting too high (e.g. if the terminals of the battery get shorted together) and also cuts the power if the voltage gets too high or low (lithium cells do not like to be over discharged).
Cells recovered from a laptop battery will not have this as there will have been a separate protection circuit board inside the battery case which handled this.

The great thing with lithium cells is they can hold a lot of energy but they also need to be treated with some respect for this same reason as if they get shorted the amount of power involved can cause them to catch fire/explode pretty spectacularly (search youtube for examples of this).
So for example if you are carrying a spare 18650 you need to make very sure it is protected from anything which can short the connections or damage the case (the whole case is the negative terminal so accidentally shorting can be easier than you might think).

So when using recovered cells from a laptop you need to be aware that there is no protection from the battery terminals being shorted and so there is the risk of fire and also they will not cut the power when the voltage drops below the recommended level and so you can end up over discharging the cell which can damage them (I don't think this is a fire risk as much as will shorten the life of the cell).

BTW - Lithium cells need to be charged in a special way so make sure whatever you use to charge them is designed for lithium cells.

You can buy protection circuits on eBay but with a single cell torch I am guessing there will not be much spare space to fit one in?
What I do is buy a 4 cell power bank case from eBay for around £2 and put the cells in this which has the protection and charging circuits built in, I then run my light from the constant 5volts supplied by the power bank.

I used to have something similar for my motorbike many years back but mine was just a double sheet of plastic sheet between two rollers which you put the paper between the two sheets.
Something like this should be pretty easy to make yourself as it doesn't require to be in a waterproof box.
I guess in really heavy rain the water might manage to get to the paper but I don't remember having this problem (in fact as long as the ink is waterproof it would probably still be readable even if it got wet as the plastic would hold it together).

There is the left indication using right arm as shown in the highway code where it clearly states "used by cyclists", although I suspect most motorists would have no idea what it means
https://www.highwaycodeuk.co.uk/signals ... users.html

I see no real benefit to customers from a smart meter as you can easily read an old style meter and monitor how much you are using if you so wish.
If interested in what you are spending on electricity I think a plug in device which monitors an individual appliances usage much more useful than total usage of the property.
When a smart meter is installed it provides the supplier with lots of data on your energy usage over time which will be of value to them and will give away personal information such as when you are away from your home, what time you go to bed etc..
They are able to remotely command a power meter to turn off so they are able to disconnect people without having to visit their property.
There is also the possibility that they will start using power factor which if implemented would put the cost up significantly for most people.

I find OSMAnd on an Android phone really good when cycling see: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osmand.plus/
It stores the maps on the phone so no data is required whilst using it and it is completely free

There is an add on to view contour lines if required: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osm ... ugin.paid/

If you want more control over the suggested routes there is: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/btools.routingapp/

You can get waterproof phone holders which mount on your handlebars on eBay very cheaply and if your phone doesn't have replaceable battery you can always connect it to a power bank if worried about battery life (I also run my lights etc. from one).

I wonder how often an "accident" occurs from the driver taking stupid risks/passing too close etc.and then just giving the excuse that they had not seen the cyclist...

Just posting some more sample data in case anyone is interested:

This is captured whilst cycling along a pretty standard main road for a few hundred meters or so.
Interestingly, of the 9 vehicles which overtook me, it looks like only 4 were 1.5 meters+ from me (and this is measured from my cycle frame not my shoulder).
It seems to only have a reliable range of around 2.5m, not sure why as it is claimed to be 4.5m

You can get the actual data in text format here: https://github.com/alanesq/ESP32Cam-ran ... e-data.txt

Grandad wrote:Any chance of getting it developed commercialy? I'm sure there would be a market for it.

I am surprised cycle cameras do not already come with this type of thing built in, especially considering the price of some of them.
e.g. a built in doppler radar to display speed of oncoming vehicles.

I like the idea of people building these themselves to use/experiment with
They are very cheap and the esp32 has built in wifi and bluetooth so the possibilities of where people could take this are endless...
It would be a great way of getting in to electronics/coding.

The esp32cam is perhaps not the best first "Arduino type board" as it does not have built in usb but it does have the sd card built in so in this case I think it a good choice even if you do not plan to use the camera.
I try to put lots of comments in the code so you can follow how it works: https://github.com/alanesq/ESP32Cam-ran ... -range.ino

Lots of info on the esp32cam board and how to use it here: https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp32-c ... duino-ide/

I have just been out for a quick test on my bike. "luckily" I got reasonably close passed within the first 100 yards (at least you can rely on cars for something

The attached graph shows the captured distance data from this event. I am pretty impressed with this result, it shows that the cars distance was measured around 14 times as it passed and each reading agrees with the distance (around 1.2 meters).

btw - I have limited its range to around 2.5 meters so basically anything over 2.5m (or if no echo is received) it will just show as 5m, so you can see that one of the attempted readings as the car passed did not work (maybe reflected from a wing mirror??)

In this case it was taking a distance reading around every 33 milliseconds. So it took a total of 460ms or nearly half a second for the car to pass.
Interesting thought that you could calculate the cars relative speed from this. I just had a quick try at a rough estimate and came up with 28mph.

Anyway, I think this works as a proof of concept, is this of interest/use to anyone? If so I will carry on developing it a bit more otherwise I think I have done all I wanted to (I was just interested to see if it would work).

I gave it a try this morning. It shows promise as it did not just trigger all the time for no obvious reason which I thought it might.
I had it set to trigger below 1m and there seemed to be very little traffic when I was using it so no one passed anything like that close.
Ironically after I stopped using it a car gave me a punishment pass for daring not to be on the cycle path which would have been a great test for it - lol

I think my next test I will modify the code to just constantly record distance readings (as suggested) and will see if the data from this correlates with passing vehicles. It looks like it will be able to record a max of around 3 readings a second.
Correction: I realised there was a delay in my sketch which served no real purpose, removing this and I am now able to get something like 90 distance readings a second - that is a bit more impressive

Jdsk wrote:

alanesq wrote:It continually reads distance and if this drops below a set threshold it takes a picture and stores it on to an sd card along with the measured distance.

Could you change that to sample and record absolute distance frequently rather than using a threshold... that might provide additional information.
Jonathan

That should not be a problem, the beauty of building something like this is you can modify it any way you wish.
I plan to take it for a test ride tomorrow so depending if it looks like it has potential or not I will take it from there. The sensor works really well on my test bench but how it will respond to being on the side of a moving cycle remains to be seen...