Brake Lights Going High Tech
March 27, 2008
Below is a press release from Virginia Tech:
BLACKSBURG, Va., March 26, 2008 — You are driving in heavy traffic. The brake lights on the car in front of you come on. Is the car slowing or is it going to stop? It slows to 25 mph and the lights go off. You drop back. The car in front of you stops suddenly! You stop just in time. The car behind you collects your rear bumper.
“The problem is that brake lights are yes and no – on and off,” according to John Hennage of Montross, Va., a Ph.D. mechanical engineering student in Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering. “The driver behind does not know the speed at which the car in front is slowing or stopping. The only other signal would be the smoke off the tires.”
The solution is an intelligent brake light system that communicates slowing and urgent stopping – rather than simply that the brake pedal is being touched. “A driver could be tapping his foot in time to music and the brake lights would blink. Or, a driver can rest her foot on the pedal and the lights would glow. It’s not enough information for the following driver,” said Hennage.
With the support of Manassas, Va., businessman Meade Gwinn, Hennage and Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Professor Mehdi Ahmadian have invented an intelligent brake light system, which they will show off at the Mid-America Trucking Show at the Kentucky Fair and Exposition Center in Louisville on March 27-29, 2008.
Gwinn came up with the idea for communicating braking speed after being rear ended on Rt. 66 in Northern Virginia. “It was part of a chain reaction accident,” he said. Afterward, he walked down the line of cars to make sure others were okay. “Two cars back was a young woman with a child in the car. They were okay but she kept saying, ‘I couldn’t tell how fast he was stopping.’ I thought, wouldn’t it be a good idea if rear tail lights communicated better and the following driver knew how fast you were stopping so they could take appropriate action?”
Years later, his youngest daughter, a student at Virginia Tech, suggested Gwinn try and get in touch with one of the engineering departments at the university. In 2000, Gwinn wrote to the university president, which led to a meeting with Walter O’Brien, professor and then head of the mechanical engineering department. “He was very helpful and encouraging, saying that this concept had the potential of great application at a very low cost,” Gwinn said. “He subsequently introduced me to Dr. Mehdi Ahmadian, who was able to develop this project into a teaching/research curriculum over the next several years.”
Ahmadian contacted Hennage to help the group of students who were assigned the problem. “I know electricity and had experience programming microcontrollers,” said Hennage, who had previously developed LED lights for commercial trucks, which Ahmadian knew.
The students developed a horizontal light bar. Lights in the middle glow amber for slowing. When stopping speed crosses a threshold to urgent, red lights flash on either side of the amber lights. If deceleration is rapid, all of the lights flash red.
“The draw backs are that the light bar would be an additional brake light because the law forbids altering original equipment,” said John Talerico, a licensing associate with Virginia Tech Intellectual Properties Inc. (VTIP). But the biggest obstacle is that the light bars cost $50 each to produce.”
So in fall of 2007, Ahmadian and Talerico approached Hennage about developing a cheaper unit that does the same thing by tapping into existing lights. “It would be for commercial trucks rather than private cars because commercial vehicles typically have redundant lights,” Hennage said. “Private cars are 10 to 15 years behind commercial vehicles in terms of LED lighting.”
Hennage developed a gravity or deceleration sensor control. Under normal braking – to slow or to stop slowly – the tail lights work in the normal fashion. But under heavy braking, extra lights flash.
“We also have the ability to connect other sensors to the microcontroller, such as from the automatic braking system, the automatic traction control, and the collision avoidance system,” said Hennage. “If any of these systems are activated, lights could flash to alert drivers of nearby vehicles.”
“There are various ways for this invention to work and we have a working prototype,” said Talerico. “A manufacturer can take the specifications and produce this circuit in mass quantities.”
Gwinn said, “Not only is this concept approaching potential commercialization, which will be most gratifying; but the educational benefit derived by numerous mechanical engineering students over the years is very heartwarming to me as well. I have met so many talented and enthusiastic students to have made significant contributions to the concept.
“The real reward to all of us, however, is to know that if this venture works out, millions of drivers will find the roads a much safer place to drive,” Gwinn said. “In the end, we are all winners!”
For more information, contact Talerico jtalerico@vtip.org at (540) 951-9376.
PHOTO INFORMATION: Students in Virginia Tech mechanical engineering Professor Mehdi Ahmadian’s senior design class developed a horizontal light bar to communicate slowing and stopping actions to a driver in a following vehicle. It had several drawbacks, including cost of production. A sensor circuit that will do the same job using the extra lights usually mounted on commercial vehicles has now been developed.
Contact Susan Trulove at strulove@vt.edu or (540) 231-5646.
PCs In Your Car… Its Coming Quickly
March 27, 2008
While this video is about an after market installation of a PC system in a car, I am certain that this will become OEM options soon. These conversions were done by In-CarPC.
Good Source of Online Software Training
March 27, 2008
Every time you buy a new piece of software you have to deal with a new learning curve. I have found a good site, Lynda.com that offers online training for a wide range of software titles. I used it to speed up my learning curve on Adobe’s Captivate which I am using to record flash movies of my desktop for my online course.
Lynda seeks out an expert in each software title and the expert walks you through a series of movies (with narration) that show you how to use all the features of the software. Each video is between 3-10 minutes long and covers a particular feature. There is a detailed outline of the videos so you can go straight to the feature you want to see.
You can buy a single course, but they offer a $25 a month “all you can eat” type subscription. This option gives you unlimited access to their entire inventory. You can jump in and subscribe for a couple of months to get the training you need and then stop the subscription at any point.
Below is an excerpt from Lynda’s website:
Lynda.com is an award-winning provider of educational materials, including Hands-On Training™ instructional books, the Online Training Library®, CD- and DVD-based video training, and events for creative designers, instructors, students, and hobbyists. The lynda.com Online Training Library® and CD-ROM titles include such subjects as Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Office, digital photography, Web design, digital video, and many others. lynda.com’s all-star team of trainers and teachers provides comprehensive and unbiased movie-based training to an international membership of tens of thousands of subscribers. Considering the speed at which technology evolves, the Online Training Library® is a great solution for keeping your skills current. Library subscriptions begin as low as $25 a month, with no long-term commitment required.
A Good Phone Holder For Car Guys
March 27, 2008
If you are like me, you have torn up many cell phone holders jumping into and out of cars. The plastic clip pops and the phone tumbles out into the parking lot. Hopefully you notice it before you pull off!
I like to use a ballistic nylon case like sold at police supply shops or gun shops. The belt loop is a strong plastic strap that is sewn into the nylon at the top and bottom. This case is not coming off your belt!
While you may not find a case that is designed specifically for a given phone, you can often find a universal type case that will work. With my last two phones, I was able to go to the local police supply store and find a case that fit pretty well. For my new Blackberry Curve I am using an Uncle Mike’s medium pager case and it looks like it was made for it.
Making the Smart Phone Plunge
March 27, 2008
I have used a hand held device for years to try to organize my personal data. For the most part they were Palm devices. I have forgotten the model of my first Palm, my second device was a Palm V and my most recent Palm device was a LifeDrive shown in the picture below.
Just for the record, lets get the terminology right. A hand held device for storing personal information is a personal digital assistant (PDA). It amazes me how many people call all hand held devices a “Palm Pilot”. Pilot was the model name of the first PDA sold by Palm in 1996 and for some reason this has become the generic name for all PDA-like devices.
While Palm still makes hardware, the Palm operating system (OS) is used by many other hardware manufacturers and is found in PDAs and phones (called a smart phone). While the Palm OS was the first on the market for hand held devices, the Windows Mobile OS is quickly becoming a more popular OS for mobile devices.
There has been virtually no changes in the Palm OS in years and many feel that Palm is on life support. I hate to see that because I have always liked the Palm interface, particularly their desktop software which I used for most my input and then synchronized with my PDA.
The problem with a PDA is that it is just another thing to keep up with. I sometimes found myself with a cell phone on my hip, my Palm LifeDrive in one pocket and a portable MP3 player in another pocket (as shown in the picture). This was just too much hardware to keep up with, something had to give!
I decided to go with a single device to do it all and make the smart phone plunge. I got the bug around the first of the year, but had to wait a couple of months for my current contract with Verizon to expire. This gave me some time to research which smart phone to go with. I did a ton of reading on smart phones including listening to a few podcasts, one of the best being, Mobile Computing Authority.
I had my eye on Apple’s iPhone. It is a nice piece of hardware, but in the end I decided to go with a Blackberry Curve, as shown in the picture. The iPhone has the potential to become a significant business class smart phone, but presently it does not offer what the Blackberry does.
The biggest drawback for the iPhone is the inability to load native applications on the phone. If you want to use the phone for an application that is not built-in by Apple, you are forced to use a web based application. With this approach, you are “dead in the water” then you loose an Internet connection such as on a plane flight or inside many commercial buildings.
While the iPhone is going for $500, I picked up my Blackberry Curve from AT&T for $200 with a $100 rebate. The data package is $30 a month, which is in addition to the standard phone minutes. I did need to change carriers from Verizon (which uses the CDMA technology) to AT&T (which uses GSM technology). You will typically find better phone choices available at GSM carriers since GSM is the dominant platform globally. Phone manufacturers know a GSM phone can be sold to a larger market.
I will likely do more posts about my Blackberry experience but Let me list out the key features.
- It has all the basic functions as a standard PDA which is typically referred to as personal information management (PIM) software. It comes with nice syncing software which allows me to synchronize my contact list and calendar events from a copy of Outlook on my desktop computer.
- I use Google’s Gmail which is web based and Google has a nice application I installed that allows me to easily check and write email directly from the Blackberry in real time.
- I also don’t use the built-in task list but use an online application. I am trying to implement the Getting Things Done (GTD) system and the standard task list just doesn’t give me enough. I am currently trying Nozbe and Remember the Milk. I will choose between one of these soon. Both offer a web interface and a mobile phone interface.
- It has a built-in 2 Mega pixel camera with flash.
- It has built-in GPS
- It has media player and the syncing software makes it easy to transfer audio and video from a computer to the Blackberry.
- There is a large amount of software applications that can be installed on the phone to add functionality.
I am having fun implementing this new piece of technology and I could see myself becoming a “Crackberry”.
