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Bicycle riders in New York now have a new weapon in the commuting wars. The CitiBike Smart Helmet will show you the way to the nearest CitiBike docking station. That’s pretty handy. Maybe I should say heady. It is a helmet after all.
The Carrera foldable helmet used for this project is embedded with LED strip lights, a FLORA accelerometer, a compass and a FLORA GPS system. All of this is used to guide the rider to the nearest bike docking station in the city, using blinking lights in the periphery of the rider’s vision to show them the way. The colorful LEDs on top serve no purpose other than to provide a cool light show, though.
That should save people a lot of time and effort. This project comes from Tyler and Justin Cooper, who have provided all the instructions to make your own CitiBike Smart Helmet if you are inclined. Pretty neat.
Bike sharing systems like New York's Citi Bike may be taking off, but it's doubtful that many participants can find every station without checking a map. Thankfully, Adafruit has unveiled a smart helmet project that could help at least a few of those riders get to their destinations while keeping their eyes on the road. The DIY effort feeds locations to an Arduino-based Flora board and its positioning add-ons, which in turn use a string of NeoPixel LEDs on the helmet as turn indicators. Commuters just have to watch for blinking lights to know where to go next. While the system isn't easy to set up when cyclists have to manually enter coordinates, it is flexible: the open-source code lets it adapt to most any bike sharing system or headpiece. As long as you can get over looking like a Christmas tree on wheels while you navigate, you can build a smart helmet of your own using the instructions at the source link.
Adafruit's Flora wearable platform is barely a year old, yet it already has a little sibling on the way -- and we do mean little. The newer Gemma is Arduino-programmable over USB like its relative, but measures just over half the size of the Flora at an inch in diameter. It's even bordering on cute, as far as circuit boards go. Before developing any grand visions of wearable computers, though, be aware that Gemma's features scale down with its size: there's only three input/output pins, and a limited amount of memory won't let it handle more than about a dozen of Adafruit's NeoPixel lights. All the same, any aspiring tailor willing to trade flexibility for subtlety in a costume will likely want to sign up for notification of the Gemma's in-stock date at the source link.
I'm not good at remembering to water my one houseplant. I know I'm not alone -- the phrase "black thumb" exists for a reason. And if some of us can't even manage something as basic as adding a little H2O regularly, asking those same people to worry a...
