ryanrs posted:

I think the problem is that what I want is just expensive, perhaps stupidly so given it's a 21 year old minivan.

StormDrain posted:

Cut in a pattern of little minivan silhouettes in alternating directions.

Please do this

ryanrs posted:

Bear Radar



Some pics of the first hand-soldered prototype. The small blue board holds the CPU, radios, and i/o. It plugs into the back of the green board, which has the thermal motion detector, radar motion detector, other sensors, and and LED floodlight. Enclosure is 3D printed with HP multijet fusion.

Specs:
Nordic nRF52840 ARM CPU
Bluetooth LE
900 MHz 1W LoRa radio
BNO055 orientation sensor (up, north)
U-blox MAX-M10 GPS
24 GHz doppler radar
Passive IR motion detector

The blue board has most of the expensive chips, and not too many passives, so I will probably hand-solder all of those. It will also take some time to get the radio stuff tested.

The green board, on the other hand, is a pain in the dick to hand-solder because it has a pile of 0402 passives. The leadless LEDs suck, too. So once I finish proving this first prototype works, I will hire a Chinese contract manufacturer to make 10 copies. I hope to get that process going sometime this month.

In the future I may make more devices, using the same blue CPU/radio board, but mated to a peripheral board with different sensor packages, other output devices, etc. One idea is a speaker to play various barking dog sound loops, controllable through the radio network. With a handful of nodes and some basic spatial audio poo poo, you could simulate a pack of dogs circling the campsite, ha ha.

While not strictly car-related, this project is interwoven with my minivan trips, so you'll hear a bit about it. The software side will stretch out 1 year+. In the beginning it'll just be a networked motion detector. But I hope to add cool stuff like self-mapping sensor deployments at some point.

ryanrs posted: