Time is strange at the moment, but weekends are still a good time for project building. So over a few weekends this project evolved and turned into two projects.

The main project came about as I wanted to a) try a VL53l1X time of flight/Lidar device b)write some  Bluetooth LE code.

The result was this board (breadboard prototype shown in pictures) and an mobile application.

As a standalone board the “Ninelocks Bike Lidar” (all projects need a name ) can sound an alarm when an object is within a certain distance. But to make it more adjustable I gave it an Bluetooth LE GATT profile so it can be configured from a phone or other Bluetooth LE device. That meant writing an phone application as well.

The phone app shown here the phone gets updates from the Lidar board and logs the current distance along with timestamp and GPS location data and for eye candy shows the most recent reading on a graph.

The phone can also sound an alarm if anything gets closer than the distance set as the trigger threshold. There is a ‘video’ below showing the device and application at work with some suggested uses.

In its bike guise it could potentially warn you of vehicles behind you (ok only up to 4 meters away and its still being tested but….) as a social distance alarm it can live on your desk to warn of approaching colleagues/ potential infection vectors.

You could maybe use it to check if you wheel have wobble or any other lidar/distance/graph  type things you can think of. Code will eventually make it to github.

The Application

There is a video (aka vid-ay-oh as they say in stoneybridge)