Hi everyone,
I'm working on a project for my school, and I'm stuck on how to approach a part of it.
Background on the project: I am trying to make a piece for some campus bikes. The piece would, ideally, send out information about the bike's location and then, if you were in range of the bike(bluetooth range) and on the campus app, you could see the bike on your phone.
Now, here is my problem, I want to keep the size down and cost of this piece relatively cheap. It would go on all of the bikes, so I don't want to have to put a Arduino on each bike.
I've been trying to look up many different ways of going about this, but there's not really any one board that could do this for me (or at least I haven't found one). I was thinking about using a bluetooth UART with a GPS chip, but I can't find one that I could code and then also use without an Arduino always attached to it.
Any ideas or hints?
Also, if anyone has a solution for increasing the range without basically getting a cell phone plane, that would also be appreciated.
Thanks!
send out information about the bike's location
Where are you sending the information? Over bluetooth? The phone will have to pair with the bike to be able to receive the data.
Your project will need a microcontroller of some sort. A GPS receiver and Bluetooth module by themselves are useless. An arduino compatible nano board will only cost $10 or so.
Have you thought about what sort of battery you'll use? How you'll charge it and how long until it goes flat?
For a campus wide project, you're probably better off using longer range rf communications like LoRa radios or even nRF24L01s in a mesh network. You could have the master interface with a wifi module(ESP8266 or similar) and update the app through that way.
So for pairing the bike and the phone, that would be done through the campus app. It would require permission from the phone, but that was something I was going to hash out in the code.
Also, for the battery, right now I was just going to use a 5v battery. I want to first get a working setup and then I was going to go look around for something that would power the battery for a longer time or even keep recharging it (I was looking into some solar power options).
Thanks for all of the info! This is some great stuff and I'll definitely be able to make good headway with all of this.
Are you working with the developers of the campus app? It will have to modified to read bluetooth data and change the map accordingly.
Yeah, I'm actually part of the group that's making the app!