Imagine seeing vehicles slow down even before they think they would need to.
Deceleration based rear-lighting systems are the natural progression of brake lights.
Traditional brake lights only light up when the brakes are applied. They however, don’t light up when a vehicle slows down independent of the brakes being used. Tailight is a system which measures the deceleration of a vehicle and visually represents it irrespective of whether the brake is applied or not. This system shows how fast a vehicle is slowing down so that people behind the vehicle can take appropriate measures to minimize the risk of collision.
I love driving my car and riding my motorbike. Bangalore (where I'm from) is known for its traffic and I can vouch for that. When I was stuck in traffic one day, I almost bumped into the car in front of me because I felt like it wasn’t slowing down but suddenly came to a halt. It’s at this point that I realized how effective it would be if I could see how a fast a vehicle is slowing down in front of me for me to maintain sufficient distance between myself and the vehicle to reduce the probability of collision.
Going into this process, I knew that I would have to apply my design thinking to build an impactful and meaningful product. Before I started putting pen to paper, I conducted a short survey with all my friends who I knew drove/ rode vehicles frequently.
Once my hypothesis of the benefits of a deceleration based lighting system was validated, I started the process of designing Tailight.
I started off with sketching the specifications and the dimensions of the product. But it was difficult to estimate how sensors would fit into the shell I was sketching.
So, I used my knowledge of microprocessors and sensors to get started with the technical specifications and to come up with a circuit diagram. Once I had the circuit diagram ready, it was easy to estimate the physical dimensions of the product.
I used the hall sensor from my bike’s speedometer to measure the number of revolutions of the wheel. I used this information to create an algorithm for my Arduino Uno board and connected the hall sensor to it, to get the prototype of Tailight to be functional.
To test my prototype, I connected Tailight V1 to my motorbike and took it for a test run around the block.
Now that I know the first version of the prototype works on an actual vehicle, I plan on:
