T195: Overdrive

Inspiration

About 1 million blind spot related car accidents take place in the US every year. This is a shockingly large number that can easily be prevented with driver assistance systems.

The problem is they are really only available on cars made in the last couple years and they are very expensive.

If you have a car without a driver assistance system, and you want one, theres really no good solution to retrofit your car to add these features. If you are buying a new car and looking for these driver assistance systems, you’re going to have to look at BMW, Audi, and other high end luxury models and pay an additional 2-3k for the the driver assistance package. At a 40k price tag, this is an unreasonable amount of money for a feature we think is essential.

What it does

Overdrive offers an app along with a couple sensors that allows anyone to easily retrofit their car to get active blind spot detection.

How I built it

We have four ultrasonic sensors that are attached to each corner of the front and rear bumpers. We use the distance formula (d = v*t) to figure out how close a car is and if there is anything in your blindspot. The sensors constantly send data to our node.js server using socket.io. The iPhone/iPad is mounted in the car and our Overdrive app reads data from the sensors via the node.js server and updates the display to show you if there is anything in your blindspot.

Challenges I ran into

Learning the physics of sensors and working with hardware. Also dealing with sockets and networking.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Getting out of our comfort zones. We are purely CS guys and aren't really familiar with hardware. It was fun working with ultrasonic sensors and learning the physics behind them.

What I learned

You shouldn't shy away from projects just because you don't completely understand how to build it. Experimenting with different technologies is very rewarding.